Recently, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced three former employees of LG Display in South Korea to prison terms ranging from 1 to 5 years for leaking key organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technologies to Chinese companies.
According to a report by the Yonhap News Agency on Sunday, the Seoul Central District Court’s Criminal Division 34 convicted the three former LG Display employees of violating the “Industrial Technology Protection Act” and leaking national core technologies.
The main culprit, a former employee surnamed Yoon, was sentenced to 5 years in prison and fined 40 million Korean won (about 185,000 Chinese yuan); another former employee surnamed Han was sentenced to 2 years in prison and fined 10 million Korean won; and a third former employee surnamed Park was sentenced to 1 year in prison with a 2-year probation.
All three defendants had worked at LG Display. Yoon and Han joined the company in 1996 and 2000, respectively, and in 2021, they both took positions at a Chinese company.
The prosecution alleged that Yoon and Han were still working at LG Display in October 2020 when they used their smartphones to photograph and leak national core technologies, including factory design plans in Guangzhou, China owned by LG Display.
In December 2021, after Yoon left the company, he instructed Han to collect production data such as panel yield rates from LG Display, who then instructed Park to provide the relevant information, which was eventually passed back to Yoon.
The prosecution stated that the leaked data involved key OLED technologies such as improving panel yield rates, reducing defect rates, and calculating production costs.
The court found all charges to be valid.
The South Korean court determined that the defendants’ disclosure of corporate core technologies to Chinese companies posed a serious threat to South Korea’s display industry competitiveness, thus “strict punishment is necessary from the perspective of national economic security.”
In recent years, cases involving Chinese companies stealing foreign technologies have been common. South Korea’s high-tech industry has seen multiple incidents of core technology leaks, with many cases involving former employees taking key technologies like semiconductors, displays, and batteries to Chinese companies. The South Korean government has been continuously strengthening the protection and enforcement of national core technologies in recent years.