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A court in South Korea has found seven former Samsung employees guilty of illegally acquiring semiconductor-related technology and transferring it to Chinese companies. They were given real deadlines.
A court in South Korea has found seven former Samsung employees guilty of illegally acquiring semiconductor-related technology and transferring it to Chinese companies. They were given real deadlines. In South Korea, home to the world’s two largest memory chip manufacturers, semiconductors are a vital part of the economy, accounting for around 20% of its exports. They are protected as “key national technology” with strict restrictions on technology transfer.
The court ruling, released Monday, concerns the theft of trade secrets by former employees of SEMES, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics that manufactures equipment used in the semiconductor and display manufacturing process.
The Suwon District Court sentenced a former SEMES employee to four years in prison for illegally obtaining the company’s patented technologies for semiconductor cleaning equipment and using these technologies to create similar tools for export to China. SEMES was fined $768,000 and six other former SEMES employees were found guilty of complicity in technology theft and sentenced to up to 2.5 years in prison.
“If such crimes are punished lightly, companies will not have the incentive to devote long time and resources to technology development,” the court decision said. “Under the guise of hiring talent, it will also make it easier for rival foreign firms to steal technologies that Korean companies have built with great effort.”
The court said the information obtained by the former employees included blueprints of the equipment and a list of related components. They were stolen from 2018 to 2020. Some of the information obtained was related to technologies covered by South Korea’s laws protecting “core national technologies”. The court said his actions also violated South Korea’s laws on fair competition and trade secret protection.
Based on the stolen information, the attackers created 24 plans for semiconductor cleaning equipment and sold 14 machines to rival Chinese firms and a Chinese research institute with a total value of approximately $59.8 million. Source
Source: Port Altele
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