A former HP executive has pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets from his previous employer IBM and attempting to pass them on to his new superiors.

Atul Malhotra spent nine years as a director of sales and business development at IBM's global services division, but moved to HP in 2006 to become a vice president in the group's imaging and printing services division.

According to US prosecutors, Malhotra asked for confidential IBM data about product costs and materials shortly before he left, and then sent them by email to two superiors at HP.

HP said it fired Malhotra after five months, having detected what had happened, and it had passed the information over to the relevant authorities. Both companies are understood to have co-operated with the investigation.