A former Ford employee has pleaded guilty in a US  federal court to two counts of theft of trade secrets.

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Xang Dong Yu, aka Mike Yu, 49, from Beijing, was a product engineer at Ford from 1997 to 2007 and had access to trade secrets, including design documents.

The court heard that in December 2006, Yu accepted a job at the China branch of a US company and on the eve of his departure from Ford he copied some 4,000 documents onto an external hard drive, including sensitive Ford design documents.

These included system design specifications for the engine/transmission mounting subsystem, electrical distribution system, electric power supply, electrical subsystem and generic body module, among others, the result of millions of dollars and decades on research, development, and testing.

Yu took the documents to his new employer in Shenzen in December 2006 before informing his Ford supervisor the following month he was leaving the company.

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A plea agreement stated that in November 2008, Yu began working for Beijing Automotive Company, a Ford competitor, and in October last year he returned to the US and was arrested.

He had in his possession his Beijing Automotive Company laptop computer which, on examination by the FBI, had 41 Ford system design specifications documents.

Under the plea agreement, Yu faces a sentence of between five and seven years based on an agreed loss amount of more than US$50m and less than US$100m and a fine of up to $150,000.

The agreement also provides that Yu will be deported from the US after completing any prison sentence.