SEMES

History

2023: Prison sentences for employees who transferred technology to China

In the second half of February 2023, it became known that a court in South Korea found seven former Samsung employees guilty of stealing technology related to the production of semiconductors and transferring them to competitors from China.

According to The Wall Street Journal, all participants in the process worked for SEMES, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, which is the largest Korean manufacturer of equipment for making semiconductor products and displays. The stolen developments included equipment design drawings and component lists: the documents were dated 2018-2020. In particular, information regarding semiconductor cleaning systems was stolen. The case file refers to 24 drawings relating to advanced treatment equipment.

Former SEMES employees handed over 24 drawings to China regarding semiconductor cleaning systems

Some of the stolen data is said to be seen as "basic national technology" protected by South Korean law. One of the accused created his own company, which supplied equipment manufactured using stolen technologies to China. In total, 14 such machines were produced with a total cost of $59.8 million. The equipment was supplied, among other things, to an unnamed Chinese research institute. This former SEMES employee received four years in prison, and his company was fined approximately $770,000. Other defendants also received prison sentences of up to two and a half years.

If such crimes are punished mildly, companies will have no incentive to allocate resources and spend a long time developing technology. It will also lead to the fact that competing foreign firms will be able to easily steal technology that Korean enterprises created with great efforts, the court ruling says.[1]

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