Central Daily News: Former CEO of Changxin Storage accused of pressuring for Samsung technology

According to a report by South Korea's "JoongAng Ilbo," a statement obtained from a former head of equipment investment at Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT), who has a background at Samsung Electronics, reveals that the former CEO of CXMT, Wang Ningguo, summoned the Korean team, including the individual in question, from October to December 2016. He demanded they bring back Samsung Electronics' Process Recipe Plan (PRP) and equipment information, threatening to report them to the South Korean government if they failed to do so, and warned them to verify their connections and not to lie. The individual stated that they felt scared at the time. The report mentioned that CXMT's management referred to Samsung Electronics as "Huangshan."

After working at Samsung Electronics for 28 years, the individual joined CXMT and was prosecuted for allegedly leaking and using Samsung's 1.6 trillion won investment in the world’s first 18-nanometer DRAM process without authorization. In April of this year, they were sentenced to seven years in prison in the first trial and are currently in the second trial. The PRP includes the sequence of about 600 steps in DRAM manufacturing, equipment, condition values, and the companies and models of the equipment. Park, a former process design engineer at Samsung, hand-copied the relevant content into a 12-page notebook in September 2016 and brought it out, and is currently under an Interpol Red Notice.

During the court hearing, the individual stated that there was a claim made during communications with the Chinese side that investment would not be provided to CXMT if they could not produce the 18-nanometer process. They later learned that the other party had wanted the technology from the very beginning, and CXMT initially had no plans to develop it independently. The pressure mentioned occurred before a meeting to prepare for the investment application. CXMT was established in 2016 with an investment of 14.4 billion yuan from Hefei Industrial Investment, a subsidiary of the Hefei municipal government, and had not been profitable for about 10 years, achieving its first annual profit last year with a net profit of 7.1 billion yuan.