Motorola sues Huawei, claiming theft of trade secrets

Vlad Bobleanta  By on 22 Jul 10

Motorola has amended a previous complaint against five ex-employees to include Huawei.

The original suit was filed for alleged sharing of trade secrets by the five workers to Lemko, a company that has a reseller agreement with Huawei.

In the new form of Motorola’s claims, filed on July 16th, the Chinese telecom infrastructure giant Huawei is named directly, as its founder, Ren Zhengfei, allegedly received information about a Motorola transceiver and other technologies from a Motorola engineer.

Motorola claims that Huawei officials knew that they were receiving stolen proprietary trade secrets and confidential information.

Huawei says the suit is groundless, and that other than a simple reseller agreement, it has no connection to Lemko whatsoever.

Such cases are usually very hard to prove from an evidence point of view, experts agree. This suit is filed in the USA, and it’s worth noting that whatever the final verdict will be, it’s not enforceable in China.

This can be either of two things.

It could be an explanation for Huawei’s recent rise to the No.2 spot in telecom infrastructure worldwide.

Or it could be a desperate attempt from Motorola to explain its fall from the very top of the telecom infrastructure market, that resulted in Nokia Siemens Networks buying that division.

Either way, there’s probably still a long way to go before any kind of verdict (or settlement) is reached.

Via Reuters

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