Seoul Central District Court and Seoul High Court buildings in Seoul. Photo by Asia Today
April 23 (Asia Today) — A former Samsung Electronics manager was sentenced to 6 years and 4 months in prison on Thursday in a retrial over charges that he leaked key semiconductor technology to a Chinese competitor.
The Seoul High Court also fined the former manager, identified by his surname Kim, 200 million won ($145,000).
The ruling came after South Korea’s Supreme Court sent the case back for a new trial, saying lower courts had wrongly treated some acts involving trade secret disclosure as part of a single offense rather than separate crimes.
Kim was accused of illegally leaking Samsung Electronics’ 18-nanometer DRAM process technology, classified as a national core technology, to Chinese memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies, also known as CXMT. He was indicted and detained in 2024. He was also accused of leaking technical data belonging to another company.
The appeals court said Kim had illegally acquired Samsung trade secrets and used them in China, calling the offense extremely serious.
The court said violations involving industrial technology, trade secrets and national core technologies waste the massive time and money invested in developing DRAM technology, severely undermine fair business order and could damage national competitiveness.
Two other defendants tried in the same case also received sentences after parts of the earlier acquittals were overturned. A former executive at a partner company was sentenced to three months in prison, while a company employee received a two-month prison term suspended for one year.
In the first trial, Kim was sentenced to seven years in prison after the court found him guilty on most charges related to trade secret leaks. The second trial upheld much of that reasoning but reduced the sentence to six years, citing findings that he had not directly participated in leaking some of Samsung’s core technology.
The Supreme Court later reversed that judgment and ordered a retrial. It said obtaining or disclosing trade secrets among accomplices during the process of leaking technology overseas should be treated as distinct crimes.
The court said South Korea’s unfair competition law defines the acquisition, use and disclosure of trade secrets to third parties as independent offenses, and separately punishes the knowing use of such secrets.
On Tuesday, another former Samsung employee charged in a related case was sentenced to seven years in prison. Authorities said that case was uncovered during an additional investigation into Kim.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
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