Chinese giant Huawei has accused six of its former employees of leaking company secrets to rival LeEco and Coolpad. The six engineers and designers have since been arrested by the authorities in China as the investigation has now begun. All six currently work for Coolpad which is a subsidiary of LeEco. Huawei says that they infringed on its intellectual property rights.
According to reports, these six employees left Huawei when the former president of its Honor sub-brand Liu Jiangfeng also left Huawei to take up the CEO position at Coolpad six months back. One of the ex-Huawei employees that have now been detained is Wu Bin who was the chief architect of the Huawei P6. The company says he has caused “huge losses” to his former employer.
Coolpad has said that Huawei’s claims are related to a patent application that was made before these six employees joined its company. It has also said that these engineers and designers did not take any documents or code from Huawei and thus they give no company secrets to Coolpad or LeEco. LeEco has also said that these claims at “pure rumor.”
Huawei isn’t convinced, though, and it’s sticking to its position that these former employees stole its secrets and gave them to a competitor. It remains to be seen how all of this is going to play out.