Ex-Samsung Exec Sued For Stealing Designs For China Plant

A former Samsung Electronics Co. executive allegedly stole blueprints and designs to try and replicate an entire semiconductor plant in China, Korean prosecutors said, outlining a stunningly ambitious attempt to set up world-class chipmaking capabilities in the world’s No. 2 economy, Shinhye Kang reported for Bloomberg News.

Photo Insert: The case comes amid rising tensions between Beijing and Washington, where the Biden administration has passed legislation and lobbied allies to keep advanced semiconductor capabilities out of the hands of Chinese companies.

Prosecutors said in a statement Monday they arrested a 65-year-old accused of stealing trade secrets from 2018 to 2019 to reproduce a chip plant in the northern city of Xi’an, backed by capital from a Taiwanese company they didn’t identify.

They didn’t name the company the accused stole from, except to call it the world’s biggest memory chipmaker.

“It’s so serious that it’s difficult to compare it in terms of the scale of the crime and the degree of damage with previous individual semiconductor technology leakage cases,” the Suwon District Prosecutors Office in South Korea said in its statement.

The case comes amid rising tensions between Beijing and Washington, where the Biden administration has passed legislation and lobbied allies to keep advanced semiconductor capabilities out of the hands of Chinese companies.

Xi Jinping’s government has argued the US is unfairly trying to hold back China’s economic development.

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