- 14 ex-huawei employees have been sentenced to jail over secret theft
- Previous engineers continued to work on Wi-Fi-chipstart Zunpai
- Huawei has been on both sides of IP -Juridic fences
A Shanghai court has sentenced 14 former Huawei employees to prison for stealing chip-related trade secrets and sending ripples over the industry not only in China but also globally.
Employees worked for Zunpai -Communication Technology -a startup founded by Hisilicon engineers, a Huawei device.
The court issued prison terms of up to six years and imposed additional financial sanctions in a decision on July 28 that landed to Huawei’s benefit.
Shanghai Court prisons former Huawei engineers over secret steal
After leaving Huawei in 2019, Zhang founded only a former researcher at Hisilicon, Zunpai in 2021 and hired former colleagues. Start-up was accused of using proprietary information by Huawei despite the fact that the company developed Wi-Fi communication chips.
According to court documents from August 2023, the Huawei subsidiary requested that Shanghai Intellectual Property Court freeze assets under Zunpai and its subsidiaries that were appreciated at 95 million yuan.
The court’s decision has not been published online and Huawei has not made any public comments on the case. According to one South China Morning Posts Report, the engineers may still have reason to challenge the decision.
More broadly, it reflects a growing commitment to China against protecting IP, with China’s supreme peoples’ procurators that 21,000 people were criminally prosecuted for IP crimes in 2024 alone, including a nine-year judgment for criminal copyright infringement of LEGO brick (via National Law Review).
For Huawai, however, it represents a reversal of roles. In 2019, Shenzhen Tech Giant was indicted for ten counts of stealing Western technology and trying to steal secrets, wire fraud and obstacle.
Techradar Pro has contacted Huawei for a comment, but we did not receive an immediate response.
