A decision from China’s highest IP court is sending a powerful message to companies and employees alike: trade-secret theft can carry consequences measured in the tens of millions of dollars.
Details emerged following a December 2025 ruling by the IP Tribunal of China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) ordering Shenzhen Create Century Machinery and a former employee of a competitor to jointly and severally pay Rmb381.63 million (US$57 million) for trade-secret misappropriation.
In May 2026, Shenzhen Create Century applied to the SPC for a retrial, and the court accepted the application for review. The company clarified that acceptance did not mean that the case had entered retrial proceedings. In September 2026, the company told the media that two hearings on its retrial application had been completed. However, the court had not yet announced whether it would grant a retrial.
While the judgment was issued in late 2025, it received renewed attention through further reporting, including a detailed analysis published by Caixin in September 2026.
The headline figure alone is striking.
What makes the case genuinely important, however, is the reasoning adopted by the court.
The dispute involved Beijing Jingdiao Technology Group, a leading CNC machine-tool manufacturer. According to commentary analyzing the ruling, a former employee copied 37,340 technical documents and drawings covering 27 product series and about 160 machine models before joining a competitor.
The employee, Xianyin Tian, was also sentenced to prison in separate criminal proceedings.
Historically, Chinese courts have often been criticised for calculating trade-secret damages too conservatively, particularly in highly technical disputes involving complex products.
The SPC appears to have moved in the opposite direction.
Instead of treating the misappropriated information as a collection of individual components, the court reportedly viewed the stolen know-how as an integrated technical system. As a result, it accepted what commentators have described as a 100 percent contribution-rate presumption, where the infringing products were found to use the rights holder’s technical secrets as an integrated whole and would have been difficult to produce within a short period without them.
That methodology may ultimately prove more significant than the size of the award itself.
For companies whose competitive edge depends on manufacturing systems, engineering databases, industrial processes or integrated technical platforms, the ruling suggests courts may increasingly recognize the value of the entire ecosystem rather than isolated fragments of information.
Patent owners, trade-secret holders and multinational manufacturers are likely to welcome the development.
For years, foreign businesses have questioned whether Chinese courts could reliably protect proprietary know-how. Decisions of this scale are likely to strengthen perceptions that China is becoming more willing to impose severe financial penalties for serious misappropriation.
The judgment also arrives as policymakers continue emphasising stronger IP protection as a foundation of national innovation policy.
Trade secrets are particularly important in sectors where patent protection may be impractical or undesirable. Manufacturing methods, production efficiencies, customer data, engineering know-how and AI-related processes often derive their value from secrecy rather than formal registration.
The combined civil and criminal outcomes send a clear signal to employees contemplating the transfer of confidential information between competitors.
For businesses operating in China, the case also reinforces the importance of documenting ownership, implementing robust access controls and preserving evidence that can support future enforcement actions.
The message from Beijing appears increasingly clear: trade secrets are no longer a secondary category of intellectual property.
They are becoming an increasingly important focus of IP enforcement.
- Asia IP
