Company: COHU
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001437749-25-004612
Chunk: 45

Company: COHU INC
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 45
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 IT systems, or those of our suppliers, could impact our sales, financial results and stock price.

We may fail to adequately protect our intellectual property and, therefore, lose our competitive advantage.

Our future success and competitive position depend in part upon our ability to obtain and maintain proprietary technology for our principal product families. If we fail to adequately protect our intellectual property, it will give our competitors a significant advantage. We own or have licensed a number of patents relating to our products, and have filed applications for additional patents. Any of our pending patent applications may be rejected, however, and we may be unable to develop additional proprietary technology that is patentable in the future. In addition, the patents that we do own or that have been issued or licensed to us may not provide us with competitive advantages and/or may be challenged by third parties.

Third parties may also design around our patents or copy our patented inventions without our knowledge. In addition to patent protection, we rely upon copyrights for protection of our proprietary software and documentation, trademarks for protection of our brand and source of goods, and trade secret law and confidentiality and exclusivity agreements for protection of our confidential and proprietary information and technology. These measures do not guarantee protection of our intellectual property, however. We can give no assurance that our copyrights will be upheld or will successfully deter infringement by third parties. Even though we routinely enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees and other third parties there can be no assurances that trade secrets and proprietary information will not be disclosed, that others will not independently develop substantially equivalent proprietary information and techniques or otherwise gain access to our trade secrets, or that we can fully protect our trade secrets and proprietary information. Violations by others of our confidentiality agreements and the loss of employees who have specialized knowledge and expertise could harm our competitive position and cause our sales and operating results to decline as a result of increased competition. It is also possible that third parties will misappropriate our trade secrets or other confidential information. We may be subject to cybersecurity breaches in which a third party obtains our confidential information. Third parties may also reverse engineer our products to copy our technology. Any of these circumstances could result in harm to our competitive position in the market.

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Failure to protect our trademarks can lead to other companies selling products using confusing similar names, thereby damaging our brand. In some countries, it can be difficult to register trademarks because of the strict examination process or blocking trademarks for other goods. Costly and time-consuming litigation might be necessary to enforce and determine the scope of our intellectual property rights, and failure to obtain or maintain