Chinese Companies Luring Korean Engineers
China is increasingly attempting to steal South Korean technologies in the sectors including EV battery, semiconductor and display.
In the OLED display industry, Chinese companies used to contact individual engineers via headhunters, but now they are posting job offers at well-known recruitment websites. It is becoming increasingly difficult to track every such attempt as those companies are increasingly using platforms with overseas servers. According to industry sources, a number of South Korean engineers are already working for major Chinese companies in the industry such as BOE and CSOT and their ratio may exceed 20 percent.
South Korean display manufacturers are trying to prevent brain drains with contract clauses, but their Chinese counterparts are circumventing in various ways. Needless to say, this leads to tech leaks. According to the National Intelligence Service and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, 17 such attempts were detected between January 2016 and June 2021, including five related to core display technologies extremely important in terms of national and economic security.
It is no coincidence that Chinese companies are now dominating the global display market. According to market research firms, their sales and share in the global LCD and OLED markets added up to US$64.8 billion and 41.5 percent last year, respectively. That year, South Korean companies’ global market share was 33.2 percent. The former outdid the latter for the first time since 2004.
The same brain drain attempts are occurring in the EV battery and semiconductor industries as well. Last year, CATL posted a large number of job openings in South Korea, saying that those hired can triple or quadruple their salaries. In the semiconductor sector, various technologies of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have been targeted by multiple tech leakers.