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Huawei's Efforts To Steal Apple Trade Secrets Include Employee Bonus Program and Other Dubious Tactics: Report (macrumors.com)
In a report published Monday, The Information [paywalled] has detailed tactics used by China's Huawei to steal Apple's trade secrets. These tactics include Huawei engineers appealing to Apple's third-party manufacturers and suppliers with promises of big orders, but instead using the opportunity to pry on processes specific to iPhone-maker's component production. From a report: According to today's report, a Huawei engineer in charge of the company's smartwatch project tracked down a supplier that makes the heart rate sensor for the Apple Watch. The Huawei engineer arranged a meeting, suggesting he was offering the supplier a lucrative manufacturing contract, but during the meeting his main intent was questioning the supplier about the Apple Watch. The Huawei engineer attended the supplier meeting with four Huawei researchers in tow. The Huawei team spent the next hour and a half pressing the supplier for details about the Apple Watch, the executive said. "They were trying their luck, but we wouldn't tell them anything," the executive said. After that, Huawei went silent.
This event reportedly reflects "a pattern of dubious tactics" performed by Huawei to obtain technology from rivals, particularly Apple's China-based suppliers. According to a Huawei spokesperson the company has not been in the wrong: "In conducting research and development, Huawei employees must search and use publicly available information and respect third-party intellectual property per our business-conduct guidelines." According to the U.S. Justice Department, Huawei is said to have a formal program that rewards employees for stealing information, including bonuses that increase based on the confidential value of the information gathered.
This event reportedly reflects "a pattern of dubious tactics" performed by Huawei to obtain technology from rivals, particularly Apple's China-based suppliers. According to a Huawei spokesperson the company has not been in the wrong: "In conducting research and development, Huawei employees must search and use publicly available information and respect third-party intellectual property per our business-conduct guidelines." According to the U.S. Justice Department, Huawei is said to have a formal program that rewards employees for stealing information, including bonuses that increase based on the confidential value of the information gathered.
Why go to the effort of tearing one apart and reverse engineering it when you can just ask somebody for the info?
A friend of mine did a job interview at Huawei and the interview was basically "tell us how you would design a node-b". My friends response was "hire me and I'll tell you, but for an interview that's not an appropriate question". This was over a decade ago. This is well documented behavior by this company.
and that is VERY good advice indeed. I haven't heard of phones being stolen but you can pretty much bet it will be hacked and it will almost certainly be used to track you. I only know one person who travels over there these days and she takes a burner phone just for those trips. Why take a chance? End of the day it's often not just the Govt doing the attacking either, if they think you have something valuable that can be sold or you're somehow a target that could be damaged to help improve their competitiveness you're a target. Apparently companies over there DOS and attack one another all the time, it's just apparently part of doing business
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This happens all the time. Investment banks do this all the time in the name of interviews. A head hunter is hired to call up somebody from a rival bank, with the lure to double their pay. The candidate attends the interview at an unofficial location, such as a hotel, and the interview team questions him about the rivals products, algorithms etc. Once they get what they want, the interview is over. There are entire companies that are engaged in corporate espionage. They do this to extract insider information about companies on the pretext of interviews and sell the information to hedge funds for money.
I worked at the GE Appliance Park in Louisville, KY. They have an entire team that does nothing but tear down competitors appliances to see how they are put together. They are also nonchalant about their competitors doing the same. It is just what everybody does.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
People are missing the human component to the engineering.
There are important pieces of information, such as, what exact specs are necessary for QA purposes? Are they buying parts with a different performance guarantee than the basic ranges listed in the data sheet?
If you don't actually want the part, but you want to know, how good does this part actually have to be in this application so that when it is finally built and is running modern software, it works well enough to satisfy QA requirements?
You can find that out by asking the right people, but you can't actually calculate any of that from a product breakdown.
When you're negotiating with a Chinese chip supplier, you don't actually negotiate over price. Prices are basically fixed, with the markup varying based on your relationship with the company. When you ask for lower prices, you're actually asking for them to spend less money making the product. A lot of people don't understand this, and it leads to (false) accusations of contract dishonesty.
Huawei of course, being a Chinese company, understands that perfectly. They're not going to go to some local supplier and ask for a cheaper heart rate monitor. That would be stupid of them. Instead, they're going to try to figure out the actual minimum operating specs of the part, and then ask for the price of those specs. That will be the lowest price they can hope to get. But they can't learn that from a breakdown, because many of the parts actually made will (accidentally) be higher quality than the spec. And sometimes some of the specs will be higher than needed because of the manufacturing process, and they might have access to a different basket of processes. So they need to know which specs are actually important, and which involve tradeoffs.