A former employee of South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after a court found that he took confidential semiconductor information and passed some of it to a Chinese company.
A former employee of South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for leaking sensitive manufacturing information to a Chinese company, according to Yonhap News Agency.
The Seoul High Court upheld the prison sentence in an appeal case, confirming the punishment handed down by a lower court.
The employee, who previously worked at SK Hynix’s office in China, was found to have taken documents containing trade secrets from the company’s internal server.
According to the court findings, he printed some of the documents and took photographs of others, breaking the company’s security rules.
The information concerned CMOS image sensors, a type of non-memory semiconductor technology used in products such as smartphone cameras and laptops.
Some of the confidential material was later included in a résumé that the former employee submitted to a Chinese company. The Chinese firm was not identified in the report.
The court found that the employee had disclosed information he was not authorised to share.
He admitted the charges during the proceedings, while SK Hynix managed to recover most of the material that had been taken.
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The case highlights the growing concern in South Korea over the loss of sensitive technology to overseas competitors, particularly as the country remains one of the world’s major producers of advanced semiconductors.
SK Hynix is one of South Korea’s biggest technology companies and a major supplier of memory chips used in smartphones, computers and other electronic devices.
The Seoul High Court did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside business hours.
The Chinese company involved in the case has not been named publicly.
The conviction also comes as South Korea continues to strengthen efforts to protect valuable industrial technology from being taken abroad.
For SK Hynix, the case is another reminder of the difficulty of protecting sensitive information when employees have access to valuable research and manufacturing data.
