SK Hynix headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. [Yonhap]
SK Hynix headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. [Yonhap]

A former SK Hynix employee who stole trade secrets to secure a job at a Chinese company failed to avoid prison in his appeal. He had printed and photographed internal company documents without authorization, used them in his resume and passed the materials to a Chinese firm.

The Seoul High Court's Criminal Division 10-1, presided over by judges Lee Sang-ho, Lee Jae-shin and Lee Hye-ran, upheld a lower court's sentence of one year and six months in prison for the defendant, identified only by his surname Kim, on charges of violating the Industrial Technology Protection Act and the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, as well as breach of fiduciary duty.

Kim had worked at SK Hynix's China subsidiary and is accused of unlawfully leaking and misusing the company's advanced technology and trade secrets related to CIS (CMOS Image Sensor, a semiconductor device that converts light into digital signals) in 2022.

Investigators found that he carried out the theft after receiving job offers from HiSilicon, a subsidiary of Huawei, China's largest telecommunications equipment maker, among other firms.

In preparing his resume, Kim violated security regulations by printing or photographing trade secret materials stored in the company's internal document management system. Some of the materials were directly cited in his resume and handed over to the Chinese companies.

The trial court had found Kim guilty of leaking trade secrets and sentenced him to prison.

The court determined that the offense was serious, given that Kim had stolen a large volume of trade secrets and submitted a resume incorporating those materials to a Chinese company.

However, both courts acquitted Kim on charges related to hybrid bonding technology used in developing HBM for AI applications. The courts found it difficult to conclude that the technology qualified as "advanced technology" subject to protection under Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy guidelines at the time.

The appeals court found no errors of fact or misapplication of law in the lower court's ruling.

"These trade secrets represent the fruits of years of investment by the victim company," the court said. "Lenient punishment for such violations would remove companies' incentive to pursue technological development and would make it easy for foreign competitors, under the guise of recruiting talent, to strip domestic companies of the technological capabilities they have built through painstaking effort."

In determining the sentence, the court weighed in Kim's favor that he admitted to all charges and that most of the leaked trade secrets had been recovered.


hanira@heraldcorp.com