Video Transcript

This isn’t a case of somebody stealing a blueprint and copying it down the street; this is really intentional theft. It almost reads like a spy novel. They turned one of our employees against us.

They lost $1.4 billion and became from a $1.6 billion company to a $200 million company.

Not only did he steal that software and give it to China so that it could be used in China to retrofit thousands of wind turbines in China, but there was stolen software running on the wind turbines in the front yard of American Superconductor.

He was told that the Chinese government would pay him cash up front, that they would build him a research facility, and all he had to do was offer intellectual property from the West that was important to the Chinese government.

Who has access, and who can gain access to things, and bring that information back to China?

They soon found a company that he initiated here in the United States going into business with a chemical company in China with full support of the government of China.

Once someone starts lying to you, I think that anything is possible.

We found out that China had in their five-year plan that it was a priority for them to grow in their corn industry—and particularly in the genetically modified corn industry.

They were literally trying to access 30 years in R&D—tens of billions of dollars of R&D

These particular seeds, just to get one to market takes on an average of eight years. So if China can forgo all the research and development—that’s hundreds to millions to billions of dollars they can not have to do in any research and development, and it advances China, and this is what they were after.

Syntactic foam is one of those technologies that is really important to the United States and that no one’s ever heard of.

We knew we had a technology that was of interest to China, and then we started delving into what was happening in Houston

They were able to recruit two former employees who had access to the trade secrets that they eventually stole. It was much more than we ever expected because every project they showed was for the Chinese government or for the Chinese Navy.

There literally is a shopping list of technology, and if your company is on that shopping list, please beware.

A threat against one of us is a threat against all of us, because it’s the same tactics that are used over and over again.

There’s two types of companies: those who have been hacked and intruded and those who don’t know they’ve been hacked and intruded.

If China worked this hard to steal a corn seed, how hard would they work to steal what you produce.

It’s the Chinese government’s long-term strategy that they want to eventually put you out of business.