In recent years, there have been frequent incidents of foreign employees leaking trade secrets to Chinese companies. According to reports from the Hankyoreh News Agency, a former employee of SK Hynix was sentenced to 18 months in prison for allegedly leaking trade secrets to a Chinese company.
The Seoul High Court upheld the decision of the lower court in the appeal case of the defendant, Mr. Kim. The Hankyoreh News Agency quoted sources from the South Korean legal community on August 9th, stating that the High Court’s Criminal Division 10-1 recently sentenced Kim, who was accused of violating the Industrial Technology Protection Act, the Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secrets Protection Act, and breach of trust, to one year and six months in prison, maintaining the sentence of the first trial.
The defendant had worked at the SK Hynix office in China and was suspected of disclosing advanced imaging sensor (CIS) technology and trade secrets of SK Hynix to a Chinese company in 2022, and maliciously exploiting them.
The court found that before committing the crime, the defendant Kim had received a job offer from a Chinese company, Hisilicon Technology Co., under Huawei. Kim violated company security regulations by printing and photographing trade secret information from the company’s document management system for the purpose of writing his resume, and then leaked it. Some of the trade secrets cited in Kim’s resume were leaked to the Chinese company.
The Seoul High Court stated that the trade secrets leaked by the defendant were the result of years of investment by SK Hynix, and if the defendant was punished lightly, it would weaken the company’s technological research and development capabilities and allow foreign competing companies to easily take away the hard-earned technology of South Korean companies under the pretext of talent recruitment.
Kim admitted to all the charges, and most of the leaked trade secrets have been recovered.
In recent years, there has been a surge in cases of leaking secrets to China. On July 29th, the Eurasia Times reported that Pierre-Henri Chuet, a former French Navy pilot trained by the U.S. Navy, was under investigation in France for allegedly collecting confidential information and providing it to the Chinese government. In February of this year, a German court sentenced Martin D., a U.S. contractor suspected of providing military secrets to Beijing, to two years and eight months in prison.