A former SK Hynix employee was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 20 million won (approximately $14,300) for stealing critical semiconductor technology before joining Huawei. The Yeoju branch of the Suwon District Court found the 36-year-old defendant, a Chinese national, guilty of violating South Korea’s Industrial Technology Protection Act. Despite evidence of her suspicious actions, the court imposed a relatively lenient sentence due to insufficient proof that Huawei had directly received or utilized the stolen information.

The defendant, who joined SK Hynix in 2013, initially worked in semiconductor defect analysis and later led business-to-business customer relations for the company’s Chinese subsidiary starting in 2020. Shortly before resigning in 2022 to join Huawei, she allegedly printed approximately 4,000 pages of sensitive technical documents over four days, concealing them in her backpack and shopping bags to evade detection. These documents contained proprietary solutions to semiconductor manufacturing process challenges, which are classified as core national technology in South Korea.

The court deemed her explanation—that she printed the documents solely for study and handover purposes—as unconvincing. The timing of her actions, combined with her subsequent acceptance of a higher-paying position at Huawei, indicated a probable intent to leverage the materials to enhance her value to her new employer.

While SK Hynix enforces strict security protocols—prohibiting USB drives and tracking all printed documents with recorded user and content details—the court noted that the Shanghai office's security measures appeared less stringent, potentially allowing the defendant’s activities to go initially unnoticed.

The court acknowledged the severity of the breach but cited a lack of clear evidence linking the defendant's actions to specific financial or operational damage at SK Hynix, thus influencing the decision for a lighter sentence.