As most companies have done, Huawei sent out a Happy New Year message on Twitter to help ring in the new year. It would have been any other day except that many were quick to realize that the tweet was actually sent via an iPhone. Given Apple and Huawei’s competition, safe to say that this was a rather embarrassing move.
You would think that Huawei would have taken this in stride and moved on, but apparently internally executives were fuming, so much so that a report from Reuters has revealed that the employees responsible for the embarrassing tweet have since been demoted. This is according to an internal memo that Reuters saw.
According to the report, what happened was the social media handler that was outsourced experienced “VPN problems” with their desktop computer, thus they turned to the use of an iPhone with a roaming SIM card to send out the tweet. Huawei claims that this incident damaged the brand and “showed procedural incompliance and management oversight”, and demoted the employees responsible by one rank, and reduced their monthly salaries by 5,000 yuan.
This is not the first time that we’ve seen tweets meant for one brand being tweeted by another brand. There was an incident a couple of months ago where a Russian celebrity was sued by Samsung for being discovered using an iPhone on television while she was meant to represent the brand.