A chip engineer who left Apple to start a new company lost ground in court after a judge allowed the tech giant to move forward with a breach-of-contract suit against him.

Gerard Williams III asked Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Mark Pierce to dismiss the suit, saying California law allows people to plan new business ventures while employed elsewhere. But Pierce denied the request, telling Williams the law doesn’t allow people to “create a competitive enterprise … on their employer’s time and with the employer’s resources.”

Apple reportedly flew a team to Seoul as the tech giant sweats a trade dispute between South Korean and Japan that could lead to a shortage in iPhone chips and OLED panels.

The meeting with Samsung, the main supplier of memory chips for iPhone, also included executives from Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Those three companies contract with Samsung for memory chips used in data centers for cloud services.

The end of a protracted legal battle between Apple and Qualcomm paves the way for the chipmaker to supply Apple with 5G modems for the 2020 line of iPhones.

Highly-respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo made the prediction in a research note.