Tuesday, March 18th, 2014
SEOUL, KOREA - The share price of SK Hynix continues to fall on the news of lawsuits against the memory chip maker raised by its rivals in the United States and Japan. At 9:17 am on March 17, the company's shares were traded at 37,150 won, down 2.11 percent from the previous trading day's 37,950.
According to foreign media reports, SanDisk filed a suit against SK Hynix for using its flash memory chip technology without licensing with the San Francisco court. Earlier on March 13, Japan's Toshiba also sued the Korean company with the Tokyo District Court claiming that the company caused damage in excess of 100 billion yen (US$985 million) by taking its own NAND flash memory technology improperly.
Toshiba contended that a former SanDisk engineer took confidential information when he left to work for Hynix in 2008. The engineer once worked at a joint venture manufacturing plant with Toshiba. Tokyo police arrested the former SanDisk engineer under the suspicion of providing NAND flash memory technical data to Hynix. An SK Hynix official said, "We will respond to the allegations after carefully reviewing the complaint documents from the Japanese court."