20 SEP 2026 — An employee at ITM Semiconductor's Vietnamese subsidiary took KRW13.2 billion, about $9.3 million. The company has recovered KRW3.5 billion and written off the rest. In the same year, the subsidiary lost KRW85.7 billion.
The theft reads like a story. The loss explains why the parent has been putting money in.
What was taken and recovered
TechNode Global reported the disclosure, which comes from ITM Semiconductor's annual report for 2025.
Of the KRW13.2 billion embezzled, KRW3.5 billion, roughly $2.47 million, has been recovered. The remaining KRW9.7 billion, about $6.8 million, was recorded as a receivable from illegal acts and written down in full, with the company noting significant uncertainty over whether it can be retrieved.
Writing an asset down in full is an accounting judgement that the money is not coming back. It is more candid than the language around it suggests.
The order of events
ITM reported the case to Vietnamese authorities in January 2026 and a police investigation is under way. The company says it conducted an internal investigation on discovering the scheme and judged the likelihood of further losses to be low.
The published account omits almost everything a reader would want before assessing that judgement. It does not name an individual, say how long the embezzlement ran, or describe how it was carried out, detected, or how the KRW3.5 billion was recovered.
A company is not obliged to publish any of that. The absence simply means the assurance that further losses are unlikely rests on an internal investigation nobody outside the company can examine.
The bigger number
ITM Semiconductor Vietnam reported a net loss of about KRW85.7 billion on revenue of KRW174 billion for 2025. The previous year's loss was KRW20.8 billion, so the loss grew roughly fourfold.
Against that, KRW13.2 billion is about fifteen per cent of one year's loss. The embezzlement is real money and it is not what is wrong with this business.
Revenue of KRW174 billion against a loss of KRW85.7 billion looks like a manufacturer whose costs are not covered by what it sells, not one that has simply been robbed. The theft made a bad year worse.
What the parent did next
In March 2026, two months after reporting the theft to Vietnamese police, the parent company put money in. A disclosure dated 23 March records ITM Semiconductor Vietnam raising KRW49,816,979,808, just under KRW49.82 billion, through convertible preferred shares in a shareholder capital increase from its parent, expected to close on 31 March.
That is close to four times the amount embezzled. It is the clearest available signal that the group thinks the subsidiary needs capital for reasons that have little to do with the fraud.
Neither disclosure references the other. The sequence is ours, assembled from two filings, and the proximity of the dates is not evidence of a causal link.
Why this is worth noting regionally
Vietnam has spent years attracting exactly this kind of investment. Korean and Japanese electronics manufacturers have built assembly and test capacity outside China. The subsidiary sits in Bac Ninh, in the northern industrial belt where much of that capacity has landed.
Internal fraud at a foreign-invested subsidiary is an unglamorous risk. It rarely features in investment-promotion material, and it scales with distance from head office. A KRW13.2 billion loss, discovered by internal investigation, reported to local police, and largely written off, is a reasonable illustration of what enforcement across two jurisdictions yields.
The recovery figure is less important than whether the subsidiary's losses narrow in the 2026 accounts. That is the problem the capital injection was for.
