In a case highlighting concerns over China pilfering American intellectual property, a Chinese telecom company has pleaded guilty in federal court in Chicago to conspiring to steal trade secrets from Motorola Solutions for digital technology used in walkie-talkies carried by cops, firefighters and others.Hytera Communications Corp. faces a fine of up to $60 million when the company is sentenced Nov. 6. The company, which entered a guilty plea Monday, also must pay an unspecified amount of restitution to Chicago-based Motorola Solutions.Hytera lured away Motorola Solutions employees with larger salaries, along with stock options, according to prosecutors. Those engineers agreed to steal documents and source code from Motorola Solutions for the company based in Shenzhen, China, according to court documents.Hytera then developed its own radio products, some of which were later sold in Illinois, prosecutors said.The thefts came after the Federal Communications Commission announced in 2008 that radio manufacturers must transition from analog to digital mobile radios — walkie-talkies. Hytera was years behind Motorola Solutions in making the transition, prosecutors said.According to notes from a Hytera meeting in 2007, the company’s main priority was mobile radios and the company needed to “defeat Motorola Solutions in the middle and high-end market.”The first Motorola Solutions employee recruited by Hytera for the scheme was G.K. Kok, who is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty. Hytera had boosted Kok's salary by 75% to $165,000 and gave him 600,000 stock options, and in return, he recruited other Motorola Solutions engineers for the scheme, prosecutors said. Hytera sold radio products made with the purloined technology across the globe through 2019.In 2020, a federal jury in Chicago ordered Hytera to pay Motorola Solutions $764 million in a lawsuit stemming from the same scheme. The district judge later reduced the award to $543 million. Then in July, a federal appeals court upheld $407 million in compensatory and punitive damages against Hytera, calling it a "large and blatant theft of trade secrets," but ordered the district court to reduce the $136 million that was awarded in separate copyright damages.