Huawei Technologies Co (華為) can get really touchy about its phones. This week, the fast-rising Chinese company demoted and cut the pay of two employees held responsible for a New Year’s greeting tweeted from Huawei’s official account — with an iPhone.
It was an embarrassing snafu for China’s biggest telecoms gear maker, which supplanted Apple Inc as the world’s No. 2 smartphone brand last year and is now gunning for the top spot.
The slip-up comes as tensions run high with Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) facing extradition from Canada to the US over alleged bank fraud.
It might also have further ruffled feathers in Shenzhen after a number of popular US blogs, including 9to5mac, picked up on and ran with the since-deleted tweet, marked “via Twitter for iPhone.”
While Huawei blamed the faux pas on an agency that it hired to handle social media abroad, the company also came down hard on the two workers. The punishment included a deduction of 5,000 yuan (US$728.39) from their monthly salary, as well as a single-level demotion, an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News said.
One of the pair was head of Huawei’s digital marketing team, according to the memo circulated among the public and government relations teams, as well as a number of employees in the consumer business unit.
Huawei declined to comment for this story.
Employees must now “tighten management of suppliers and partners,” Huawei said in its memo.
“The incident exposed flaws in our processes and management,” it said.
Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Monday introduced the company’s latest supercomputer platform, featuring six new chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), saying that it is now “in full production.” “If Vera Rubin is going to be in time for this year, it must be in production by now, and so, today I can tell you that Vera Rubin is in full production,” Huang said during his keynote speech at CES in Las Vegas. The rollout of six concurrent chips for Vera Rubin — the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) computing platform — marks a strategic
REVENUE PERFORMANCE: Cloud and network products, and electronic components saw strong increases, while smart consumer electronics and computing products fell Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday posted 26.51 percent quarterly growth in revenue for last quarter to NT$2.6 trillion (US$82.44 billion), the strongest on record for the period and above expectations, but the company forecast a slight revenue dip this quarter due to seasonal factors. On an annual basis, revenue last quarter grew 22.07 percent, the company said. Analysts on average estimated about NT$2.4 trillion increase. Hon Hai, which assembles servers for Nvidia Corp and iPhones for Apple Inc, is expanding its capacity in the US, adding artificial intelligence (AI) server production in Wisconsin and Texas, where it operates established campuses. This
US President Donald Trump on Friday blocked US photonics firm HieFo Corp’s US$3 million acquisition of assets in New Jersey-based aerospace and defense specialist Emcore Corp, citing national security and China-related concerns. In an order released by the White House, Trump said HieFo was “controlled by a citizen of the People’s Republic of China” and that its 2024 acquisition of Emcore’s businesses led the US president to believe that it might “take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.” The order did not name the person or detail Trump’s concerns. “The Transaction is hereby prohibited,”
Garment maker Makalot Industrial Co (聚陽) yesterday reported lower-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue of NT$7.93 billion (US$251.44 million), down 9.48 percent from NT$8.76 billion a year earlier. On a quarterly basis, revenue fell 10.83 percent from NT$8.89 billion, company data showed. The figure was also lower than market expectations of NT$8.05 billion, according to data compiled by Yuanta Securities Investment and Consulting Co (元大投顧), which had projected NT$8.22 billion. Makalot’s revenue this quarter would likely increase by a mid-teens percentage as the industry is entering its high season, Yuanta said. Overall, Makalot’s revenue last year totaled NT$34.43 billion, down 3.08 percent from its record NT$35.52
RSS