Trade Secrets

Case study LG Display workers charged with stealing Samsung OLED secrets Executive summary This report is related to confidentiality argument for the protection of trade secrets. The report investigates the conflict between Samsung and LG. Samsung claims that LG stole its display technology and blame its own Samsung employees. Samsung accused eleven people, including six of its own employees of stealing its trade secrets and it claims that LG has stole its display technology. Introduction

Trade secrets are any confidential business information which provides an enterprise a competitive edge. Trade secrets can be manufacturing or industrial secrets and commercial secrets. It can be in form of ingredients/chemical composition of a product or the details of a manufacturing process. Trade secrets are the information that is kept secret by the companies to give them an advantage over their competitors. History and background Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational  company.

It was founded by Lee Byung-chull in 1938 as a trading company. Its headquarter is in Samsung Town, Seoul Korea. It comprises numerous subsidiaries and affiliated businesses, most of them united under the Samsung brand, and are the largest South Korean company. It is worldwide famous brand. According to the founder of Samsung Group, the meaning of the word Samsung is “tristar” or “three stars”. The word “three” represents something “big, numerous and powerful”; the “stars” mean eternity. Samsung entered the electronics industry in the late 1960s.

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In 1938, Lee Byung-chull who belongs to large landowning family founded Samsung Sanghoe, a small trading company with forty employees located in Su-dong. It dealt in groceries produced in and around the city and produced its own noodles. After that Lee started sugar refinery and woolen mill. It was the largest ever in the country and the company took on the aspect of a major company. In 1948, the Hyosung group’s founder joined Samsung group and invested in a new company called Samsung Mulsan Gongsa or the Samsung Trading Corporation, ith the Samsung Group. The trading firm grew to become the present-day Samsung C&T Corporation. But after some years these two companies Samsung and Hyosung separated due to differences in management between them. In the late 1960s, Samsung Group entered into the electronics industry. It formed several electronics-related divisions, such as Samsung Electronics Devices Co. , Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co. , Samsung Corning Co. , and Samsung Semiconductor & Telecommunications Co. , and made the facility in Suwon which lies about 30 km south of Seoul.

Its first electronic product was a black-and-white television set. In 1980, Samsung entered the telecommunications hardware industry. Its early products were switchboards. Then it started to developed the telephone and fax manufacturing systems and became the centre of Samsung’s mobile phone manufacturing which is one of the top mobile company in the world now. They have produced over 800 million mobile phones till now. Samsung diversified into many areas established Samsung as an industry leader in a wide range of enterprises, moving into businesses such as insurance, securities, and retail..

Samsung started to rise as an international corporation in the 1990s. Samsung became the largest producer of memory chips in the world in 1992, and is the world’s second-largest chipmaker after Intel. In 1995, it created its first liquid-crystal display screen. Ten years later, Samsung grew to be the world’s largest manufacturer of liquid-crystal display panels. Sony, which had not invested in large-size TFT-LCDs, contacted Samsung to cooperate, and, in 2006, S-LCD was established as a joint venture between Samsung and Sony in order to provide a stable supply of LCD panels for both manufacturers.

S-LCD was owned by Samsung 51% share and Sony 49% share. As on 26 December 2011 it was announced that Samsung had acquired the stake of Sony in this joint venture. In the first quarter of 2012, Samsung Electronics became the world’s largest mobile phone maker by unit sales, overtaking Nokia, which had been the market leader since 1998. LG Corporation is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation formed by Koo In-Hwoi in 1947. It is the fourth-largest company South Korea, after Samsung Group, Hyundai Motors Group and SK group.

Its headquarters are situated in the LG Twin Towers building in Seoul. LG is specialized in making electronics, chemicals, and telecom products. The LG Group was a merger of two Korean companies, Lucky and GoldStar, from which the abbreviation of LG was derived. The current “Life’s Good” slogan is a backronym. Before the corporate name change to LG, household products were sold under the brand name ofLucky, while electronic products were sold under the brand name of GoldStar . In January 2009 LG was able to buy the domain nameLG. om, for a price reportedly to be more than $100 million, placing it among the companies who own their two letter brand’s domain name. [7] In 1994 GoldStar gained sponsorship from The 3DO Company to make the first 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. In 1995, GoldStar was renamed LG Electronics, and acquired Zenith Electronics of the United States. LG Solar Energy is a subsidiary formed in 2007 to allow LG Chem to supply polysilicon to LG Electronics for production of solar cells. In 2008, LG took its first dive into the solar-panel manufacturing pool, as it announced a preliminary deal to form a joint venture with Conergy.

Under the deal, set to be completed by year’s end, LG would acquire a 75 percent stake in Conergy’s Frankfurt solar-panel plant. LG has produced camcorders called ARTCAM and DSLRs. LG Electronics has about 75 subsidiaries worldwide with around 91,045 employees. LG Electronics owns Zenith (subsidiary) and controls 37. 9 percent of LG Display. LG Electronics’ products includes computers, television, mobie phones, home appliances and semiconductors like DRAM, SDRAM and flash memory. LG Electronics introduced their first Internet TV in 2007, originally branded as “NetCast Entertainment Access” devices.

They later renamed the 2011 Internet TV’s to “LG Smart TV” when more interactive television features were added, that enables the audience to receive information from the Internet while at the same time watching conventional TV programming. include computers, televisions, mobilephones, home appliances and semiconductors (DRAM, SDRAM andflash mem a http://bgr. com/2012/07/17/lg-display-samsung-oled-technology-theft/ http://www. samsung. com/uk/aboutsamsung/corporateprofile/history06. html