SEOUL, Feb. 7 (Yonhap) -- A Seoul court on Thursday sentenced four people to suspended prison terms for their involvement in stealing key technologies of the world's largest memory chip maker Samsung Electronics Co. and handing them over to its rival Hynix Semiconductor Inc.

Prosecutors indicted 18 defendants -- 10 employees from U.S.-based chip-gear maker Applied Materials Inc., three from Samsung Electronics, and five from Hynix Semiconductor -- for stealing Samsung's chip technologies and business secrets and providing them to Hynix through Applied Materials between January 2005 and November 2009.