This undated photo provided by SK hynix Inc. shows workers at the company’s chip plant in Icheon, south of Seoul.

SEOUL, Nov. 8 (Korea Bizwire) – A Chinese national and former SK Hynix employee has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 20 million won for misappropriating critical semiconductor technology before taking a position at Huawei.

The Yeoju branch of the Suwon District Court found the 36-year-old female defendant guilty of violating South Korea’s Industrial Technology Protection Act.

The court rejected her claim that she had printed the documents, which contained technology designated as core national technology in 2022, for study purposes and to facilitate work handover.

“The defendant’s actions of printing approximately 4,000 pages of technical documents over four days at SK Hynix’s Shanghai office, which had relatively lax security measures, just before her resignation, were highly unusual,” the court stated.

“There are reasonable grounds to suspect that she removed these documents in batches of about 300 pages daily, concealing them in her backpack and shopping bags.”

The court suggested that the defendant’s subsequent employment at Huawei indicated she likely intended to use the materials to prove her value to her new employer.

However, the relatively lenient sentence took into account that there was no clear evidence the stolen technology had been utilized, and SK Hynix had not demonstrated specific damages.

The defendant, who joined SK Hynix in 2013, worked in semiconductor defect analysis before serving as a team leader handling business-to-business customer relations at the company’s Chinese subsidiary from 2020 to 2022.

She returned to South Korea in June 2022 before accepting a higher-paying position at Huawei that same month.

An investigation revealed that prior to her departure from SK Hynix, she printed approximately 4,000 pages of documents containing solutions to semiconductor manufacturing process issues.

SK Hynix maintains strict security protocols, prohibiting the use of USB drives and other storage devices, while closely monitoring printed materials by recording details including content, printer user information, and intended use.

Ashley Song (ashley@koreabizwire.com)