Accusations of intellectual property rights infringement against senior executives at VIA Technologies are expected to hurt sales next year.

On Friday, the public prosecutor of the Taipei District Court accused VIA chairwoman Cher Wang and her husband Chen Wen-chi, president of the company, of stealing technology from one of their networking product clients, D-Link Corp , of spying on the company and breaching its trust.

"There has been no major impact on VIA's business yet, but many networking product clients are currently reviewing their orders," said Nathan Lin, an analyst at SinoPac Securities Corp. "If the courts announce that VIA did actually infringe D-Link's copyright, they will withdraw their orders."

Other legal disputes with Intel over patent infringements seriously hurt VIA's core business of chipsets this year, and news of more time in court for the beleaguered company could hurt it further, a Goldman Sachs report said.

"We believe VIA may need to cut prices further to maintain market share going forward following damage to its franchise," the report said.

In the first 11 months of this year, VIA has seen its sales drop by almost one fifth to around US$550 million from US$680 million a year ago.

The prominent couple denied the charges publicly on Wednesday evening, which a senior official at VIA confirmed yesterday.

"VIA strongly believes that no wrongdoing has occurred in this case, and the charges that have been made are based on misunderstandings of the actual circumstances," VIA spokesman Richard Brown told the Taipei Times in an e-mail statement yesterday.

"We have been in very close contact with all our customers in the past few days, including those buying our networking chips, and have experienced no cancellations of orders," Brown said.

"In fact, the response from our customers has been overwhelmingly supportive. D-Link, by the way, is still a very important customer of VIA's and we continue to work with them closely," he said. "As for investors, we have also communicated very closely with them, and held a conference call for overseas investors on Monday which was very well attended. So far we have not received any indications that there are investors are considering pulling out."

A report from Credit Suisse First Boston in Taipei also downplays the impact of the court cases, saying that it may take up to two years before a decision is reached and VIA doesn't even sell the product under dispute.

"It would be difficult for D-Link to prove that its business has been hurt by VIA's products and then ask for compensation," the report said.