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Chinese ‘spies’ stole Dutch chip machinery giant’s secrets, newspaper says

  • Links between company accused of receiving confidential information and Beijing, according to report
  • Investigation follows US court ruling against six Chinese employees of semiconductor maker ASML
A newspaper in the Netherlands claims to have found evidence that six employees of Dutch semiconductor giant ASML passed corporate secrets to a company linked to the Chinese government. Photo: AFP
A newspaper in the Netherlands claims to have found evidence that six employees of Dutch semiconductor giant ASML passed corporate secrets to a company linked to the Chinese government. Photo: AFP
An investigation by a financial newspaper in the Netherlands has concluded that Chinese employees stole corporate secrets from Dutch semiconductor equipment giant ASML, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
The daily newspaper, Het Financieele Dagblad, reported on Thursday that ASML itself had “found no hard proof of involvement of the Chinese government” but that its own probe had determined that stolen technology had been ultimately leaked to a state-linked company.
According to the newspaper report, high-level Chinese employees in the research and development department of ASML’s US subsidiary were behind the breach.

An ASML spokeswoman said the company was aware of the report and was preparing a response.

The chip maker caught in US assault on China’s tech ambitions
ASML is the dominant maker of lithography systems, used to trace out the circuitry of semiconductor chips.
The newspaper based its report partly on company sources and partly on a November 2018 ruling by a California court in a suit between ASML’s US subsidiary and a subsidiary of a Chinese company, XTAL Inc.

The documents from the California Superior Court in Santa Clara show six former ASML employees, all with Chinese names, breached their employment contracts by sharing information on ASML software processes with XTAL, according to the report.

“The FD’s investigation found XTAL’s Chinese parent company Dongfang Jingyuan has ties with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology,” the newspaper said.

The court awarded ASML US$223 million in damages and XTAL filed for bankruptcy a month later.

The Dutch intelligence agency has included warnings in its annual threat assessments for the past several years, saying that China is targeting tech companies in the Netherlands, as it does in other countries, for intellectual property theft.

In 2015, ASML disclosed a breach of its computer systems, but said at the time damage from the hack was limited and released few further details.

ASML’s sales to China doubled to 1.8 billion euros (US$2 billion) in 2018 from 919 million euros in 2017 as Beijing makes growth of its semiconductor industry a priority.

ASML CEO Peter Wennink said in January he saw no let-up in demand from China, despite an economic slowdown.

Source: SCMP

Posted on 11/04/2019 at 10:24 in ASML CEO, Beijing, California Superior Court, China alert, Chinese company, XTAL Inc, Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, Dongfang Jingyuan, Dutch chip machinery giant, Het Financieele Dagblad, intellectual property theft, Peter Wennink, Santa Clara, semiconductor maker ASML, spies, the Netherlands, Uncategorized   |  RSS feed |   Reply   |   Trackback URL

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