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Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal alleges billions spent on secrets
Add Time：2012-10-27 23:15:00 Clicks：
The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that South Korean steel company POSCO, against which Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation has filed a damage lawsuit for allegedly stealing its technology, might have spent several billion yen to obtain confidential information.
Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, which became the world's second biggest steelmaker when Nippon Steel Corporation and Sumitomo Metal Industries Limited merged this month, spent more than half a year before bringing a suit to demand that the world's fifth biggest steelmaker pay JPY 98.6 billion in damage compensation.
The lawsuit, the first hearing of which was held at the Tokyo District Court on October 25th 2012, centered on the technology to produce so called grain oriented electrical steel sheets. The Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal senior official described the technology as a top secret even our president cannot be privy to.
With the technology, the Japanese company expanded its market share of the product to about 30%. However, POSCO rapidly caught up with Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal in this field, which made the Japanese maker suspicious.
Its suspicion was confirmed in 2007, when a former POSCO researcher was arrested by South Korean authorities for leaking confidential information to a Chinese steelmaker.
Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal gathered information that became available through South Korean trials of the former researcher. As a result, the steelmaker found four of the company's former employees might have been involved in information leakage to POSCO.
In autumn last year, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal made one petition after another for the preservation of evidence in Japanese court, collecting dozens of boxes of material from the residences of the four former employees and other related sites.
After analysis, the company concluded the four leaked information to POSCO since no later than 1987. It filed the lawsuit against its South Korean rival in April 2012.
According to the complaint, the four were experienced employees who left Nippon Steel in the 1980s and 1990s. Two of them reportedly established a steelmaking equipment company after retirement and made licensing agreements with POSCO's Japanese arm, for which they received a large sum of money. One of the four became a visiting professor at a South Korean university that was funded by POSCO.
According to a senior official, two of the four are now deceased, but one has admitted in the course of Nippon Steel's investigation that he received money for selling technical information to POSCO.
The former visiting professor, against whom a suit is being brought along with POSCO by Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, admitted in a written statement submitted to the court that he possessed a copy of the document carrying the technological information in question.
Source - The Yomiuri Shimbun
Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, which became the world's second biggest steelmaker when Nippon Steel Corporation and Sumitomo Metal Industries Limited merged this month, spent more than half a year before bringing a suit to demand that the world's fifth biggest steelmaker pay JPY 98.6 billion in damage compensation.
The lawsuit, the first hearing of which was held at the Tokyo District Court on October 25th 2012, centered on the technology to produce so called grain oriented electrical steel sheets. The Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal senior official described the technology as a top secret even our president cannot be privy to.
With the technology, the Japanese company expanded its market share of the product to about 30%. However, POSCO rapidly caught up with Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal in this field, which made the Japanese maker suspicious.
Its suspicion was confirmed in 2007, when a former POSCO researcher was arrested by South Korean authorities for leaking confidential information to a Chinese steelmaker.
Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal gathered information that became available through South Korean trials of the former researcher. As a result, the steelmaker found four of the company's former employees might have been involved in information leakage to POSCO.
In autumn last year, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal made one petition after another for the preservation of evidence in Japanese court, collecting dozens of boxes of material from the residences of the four former employees and other related sites.
After analysis, the company concluded the four leaked information to POSCO since no later than 1987. It filed the lawsuit against its South Korean rival in April 2012.
According to the complaint, the four were experienced employees who left Nippon Steel in the 1980s and 1990s. Two of them reportedly established a steelmaking equipment company after retirement and made licensing agreements with POSCO's Japanese arm, for which they received a large sum of money. One of the four became a visiting professor at a South Korean university that was funded by POSCO.
According to a senior official, two of the four are now deceased, but one has admitted in the course of Nippon Steel's investigation that he received money for selling technical information to POSCO.
The former visiting professor, against whom a suit is being brought along with POSCO by Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, admitted in a written statement submitted to the court that he possessed a copy of the document carrying the technological information in question.
Source - The Yomiuri Shimbun