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The National Intelligence Service apprehended and handed over to prosecutors a former executive of a shipbuilding company who tried to pass on key Korean shipbuilding technology to China. The man is a former head of the technology planning team at Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering. He is accused of copying blueprints for 69 vessels and a shipyard copying altogether 360,000 files worth W517.5 billion (US$1=W925) in research and development costs alone. Those files, if handed over to China, would have narrowed the technology gap between China and Korea by two to three years, while causing W35 trillion in damages to Korean shipbuilders over the next five years, shipbuilding experts estimated. At the end of last year, the man moved to a local ship-design firm as its vice president. That firm launched a joint venture with China's Qingdao city government to build a large shipyard.
The incident demonstrates that industrial espionage in Korea is expanding from mobile phones, semiconductors and other IT products to automobiles and ships. These are all key industries that are pillars of Korea¡¯s economy. Korean companies which do not possess core technologies make a living by devising ways to commercialize them and developing production processes. If we cannot protect these technologies, the Korean economy will quickly lose competitiveness.
The problem does not involve only industrial spies. Chinese companies that got a late start in the industry either scout for talented Korean technicians or buy small companies that have key products, only to get their hands on the latest technology. Just after the Asian financial crisis, Taiwan hired laid-off Korean semiconductor engineers and was thus able to advance its chip industry to become a global heavyweight.
This year alone, a law came into effect to prevent leaks of strategically important technology. But there are limits to blocking the leaks: it is impossible to protect know-how that is stored in the brains of engineers and technicians. Businesses themselves must realize the importance of managing retired engineers while rewarding existing ones. The fact that 85 percent of industrial espionage involves former and present workers shows human resource management is the key to preventing illegal transfers of technology.
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