Investors Treat IP Protection as a Core Competency, Invest In Firms Showing They Are Able To Secure Their Secrets

We are seeing this more and more: IP gets stolen and the share price falls.

12 % fall in the case of ASML

The ASML internal spy was able to steal secrets about the EUs most strategically valuable technology: extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines.

Valuable IP assets and questionable security makes investors jittery.

Industrial theft is now a systemic risk for tech firms, especially those like ASML.

Companies must now prove they can protect their intellectual property (IP) or risk seeing their equity valuations reset to reflect theft risks.

TSMC, a company with many thousands of protected trade secrets, just invested $2.5bn in AI cyber security to protect their IP.

Trade secret theft is becoming the new normal and investors are forcing companies to take steps to respond.

What does this mean for business in general?