Company: FRHC
Filing Date: 2025-06-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000924805-25-000012
Chunk: 117

Company: Freedom Holding Corp.
Filing Date: 2025-06-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 117
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 transactions and arrangements. Adverse developments could impair our reputation and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows.

We may fail to adequately obtain, maintain, enforce and protect our intellectual property and similar proprietary rights, which may harm our business and competitive position.

Our ability to succeed and remain competitive depends in part on adequately securing, maintaining, protecting, enforcing, and defending our intellectual property rights and proprietary technology. In addition to registration of our trademarks and other intellectual property in various jurisdictions, we rely on a combination of intellectual property laws and contractual arrangements, including confidentiality and non-compete arrangements with our employees, to protect our proprietary rights. However, the measures we implement to safeguard these rights may not be adequate to fully prevent third parties from infringing upon, misappropriating, or otherwise violating our intellectual property, or from improperly disclosing or using our trade secrets and other confidential information. We make strategic decisions regarding when to pursue trademark or copyright registration or initiate other intellectual property protections, and when to rely on trade secret safeguard measures, but these decisions may ultimately prove insufficient. Additionally, we cannot protect our intellectual property if we are unable to detect unauthorized use or infringement. See also "Intellectual Property" in Part I Item 1 "Business" of this annual report.

Our intellectual property rights could be challenged, invalidated, circumvented or misappropriated despite the steps we take to protect them. For example, third parties might copy, acquire, or use our intellectual property, including trade secrets, without authorization. Additionally, the use of trademarks or service names similar to ours could harm our brand identity and cause customer confusion. Similarly, confidentiality and non-compete agreements may be breached by counterparties or our employees under our standard employment contracts, and there may not be adequate remedies available to us for any such breach. We cannot be certain that all persons and entities contributing to our intellectual property have validly assigned to us all applicable intellectual property rights they may have, or that we will be able to enforce our rights under any such agreements. Furthermore, we cannot guarantee that confidentiality agreements are in place with every party that currently has, or previously had, access to our proprietary information, trade secrets, or know-how. Even where such agreements exist, they may not effectively prevent unauthorized access, use, disclosure, misappropriation, or reverse engineering of our intellectual property and proprietary information. We also might fail to maintain or be unable to obtain adequate protections for some of our intellectual property rights as such rights might not receive the same degree of protection in various jurisdictions