Prosecutors said on Tuesday that a former Samsung executive has been accused of stealing company secrets for a Chinese copycat computer chip factory, and is being detained in detention pending trial.
In a separate statement, the Suwon District Prosecutors’ Office said, “The 65-year-old man, who has not been identified, reportedly stole Samsung trade secrets in order to establish a chip factory in the Chinese city of Xian, near where Samsung has a plant”.
The material he took was classified as ‘national core technology’– innovations designated by South Korean law as having the potential to have a significant detrimental impact on national security and the economy if disclosed overseas.
A spokesperson of the Suwon District Prosecutors’ Office said, “He’s currently detained at the Suwon Detention Center”.
Securing sophisticated chip supplies has become a critical problem globally, with the United States and China embroiled in a fierce battle for market dominance.
Samsung is one of the world’s top manufacturers of memory chips and smartphones, with a total revenue of nearly one-fifth of South Korea’s gross domestic product(GDP).
According to the investigators, the Samsung factory blueprints and clean-room designs from 2018 and 2019 that the suspect reportedly sought to steal were worth at least 300 billion won ($236 million) to Samsung.
The statement further reads, “It is a serious crime that can have a tremendous negative impact on our economic security by shaking the foundation of the domestic semiconductor industry at a time when competition for chip production is intensifying day by day”.
“The semiconductor industry accounted for 16.5 percent of South Korea’s total exports as of 2022, and is a national security asset”, the statement added.
Six additional people who worked for the jailed executive and are suspected of being engaged in the theft have been charged by prosecutors.
Prosecutors said the individual worked for 28 years at South Korea’s leading chipmakers and is a top expert in semiconductor manufacturing in the country.
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