A man was sentenced to 1.5 years in prison in the second instance for leaking SK Hynix's trade secrets to a Chinese company.

According to Yonhap News Agency, former SK Hynix China local subsidiary employee Kim (South Korean national) was sentenced to 1 year and 6 months in prison in the second instance for leaking the company’s business secrets to a Chinese firm. In 2022, Kim intended to switch jobs to Chinese enterprises including Huawei’s subsidiary HiSilicon. He violated the company’s security rules by printing or photographing a large volume of cutting-edge technology and business secret documents related to CIS (CMOS image sensors) from the internal document management system, and directly quoted parts of the content in his resume submitted to the Chinese company, completing the leak. Prosecutors indicted Kim on charges including violations of the Industrial Technology Protection Act, the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, and breach of trust. The first-instance court found Kim guilty of leaking business secrets, sentencing him to 1 year and 6 months in prison, but acquitted him of charges related to Hybrid Bonding technology, stating that the technology had not been included in the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy’s list of advanced technologies at the time. Criminal Division 10-1 of the Seoul High Court recently issued the second-instance ruling, fully upholding the original sentence. The court noted that Kim leaked a large amount of business secrets and submitted them to the Chinese company via his resume, constituting a serious offense. The documents were the result of years of R&D investment by the victim company; a lenient sentence in such cases would weaken enterprises’ motivation for technological development and make it easy for overseas competitors to steal South Korean technology through talent recruitment. The court also considered that Kim had fully confessed and most of the documents had been recovered, so it did not impose a heavier penalty.