Integrated circuit designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it would appeal a not guilty verdict given to two former employees who were charged with misappropriation of trade secrets.
The announcement came amid intense media focus on industrial espionage — especially by China, as it poaches talent from around the world to achieve its goal of becoming a major player in the global semiconductor industry by 2025.
The Hsinchu-based company, which makes most of its revenue in China, said it deeply regretted the Taipei District Court’s ruling last month.
MediaTek said in a statement that it has hired lawyers to file an appeal in a bid to safeguard its interests, and prevent loss of talent and technology to rivals.
“The trade secret theft has severely damaged the company’s interests. MediaTek has to safeguard and protect its important human assets with significant economic value. The company will not tolerate any violations,” it said.
Lin Pi-yu (林碧玉) took advantage of her position in the human resources department and stole personal information about the firm’s important employees, such as their names, job titles, expertise and work experience, the company said.
She then sent the information to her personal e-mail in preparation for opening a headhunter agency in May 2012, it said.
“Talent is extremely crucial in enhancing a high-tech company’s competitiveness. It is especially true for the highly competitive semiconductor industry,” MediaTek said.
Lin and her husband, Chen We-ren (陳威任), a former senior engineer at the chipmaker, were under investigation for the past three years for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
However, the court said that there was no strong evidence that the couple was guilty of the charge, adding that MediaTek did not suffer any material losses due to their actions.
The personal information of MediaTek employees does not have any economic value and cannot be deemed trade secrets, the court said.
The theft of the information does not have any adverse affect on the firm’s operations, the court added.
Furthermore, three former employees who testified as witnesses said that their departures were due mostly to personal reasons and that they did not have direct links to Lin, the court said.
Shares of MediaTek rose 1.1 percent yesterday to close at NT$230 in Taipei trading.
They have declined 21.77 percent since the beginning of the year.
Deutsche Bank AG has lowered its 12-month target price on the MediaTek stock to NT$400 from NT$440, but maintained its “buy” recommendation on prospects for gross margin expansion and earnings turnaround next year, Deutsche Bank research analyst Michael Chou (周立中) said in a note on Thursday.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS