South Korean prosecutors and court testimony allege that Chinese memory giant CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies) built its business on stolen Samsung technology from the very start — bad news for Samsung and South Korea's semiconductor industry, and for CXMT the equivalent of years of saved R&D time.

• An engineer who left Samsung and helped found CXMT admitted in court that when CXMT was established in 2016 it never intended to develop the technology itself, instead targeting Samsung's core process data directly.
• What leaked was the "manufacturing recipe" for Samsung's 18-nanometre-class DRAM, covering 600 process steps and equipment conditions, copied into 12 pages of notes and carried out.
• After obtaining the data, CXMT modified and validated it for its own production lines, began mass-producing DRAM in 2019, and within a decade rose to become a significant competitor in the global DRAM market.
• Samsung spent five years and roughly 1.6 trillion won accumulating this know-how; what was really taken was the trial-and-error time that money can least easily buy.
• The former Samsung employee involved in the case was sentenced to seven years at first instance this April, and South Korean legal circles question whether the sentence is too light to deter the next such case.

Outlook: South Korea is discussing heavier sentencing for technology leaks and intervening before technology reaches a rival's production lines, so that semiconductors do not repeat the display panel industry's fate of being overtaken.