Huawei. After years and years of copying Apple, today the methods by which the Chinese managed to catch up with the American company, without doing much, were finally detailed. We begin with a story of an Apple partner who met with Huawei employees promising large orders of smartwatch components, only to find out the specifications of the heart rate sensor in the Apple Watch, presumably because they had something inferior.
Huawei. It seems that the Chinese employees would have said that they had a design similar to that of Apple, refusing to present sketches in this regard, but asking Apple's partner to estimate approximately how much the components would cost to produce it. The Huawei employees wanted to see sketches of the sensor in the Apple Watch, as well as to find out what kind of prices Apple gets for the components that are used to produce it, but they were not very successful.
Huawei. In another attempt to get information from another Apple partner, a Chinese employee sent a picture of a type of material, asking the Apple partner to suggest a design he had worked with before. Apple's partner did not cooperate here either, but the tactic is old, the US Ministry of Justice stating that Huawei employees receive bonuses for industrial secrets obtained, the amount depending on the importance of the information they manage to steal or buy.
Huawei has a complex strategy to copy Apple and steal industrial secrets
Huawei. It seems because it exists suspicions that the thin hinge in the MacBook Pro 2016 case would also have been copied by the Chinese, an Apple partner seeing from one of their employees a diagram that was almost identical to that of the component in the Apple laptop. That partner refused to manufacture that hinge for Huawei, but the Chinese managed to produce it elsewhere, and in the MateBook Pro there is one that is very similar to Apple's.
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.
Huawei. The company also pays very well for prototypes, components, or sketches stolen by the employees who work on assembling Apple products, or just for drawings made by them based on the sketches used in production. It is not known how much money Huawei is willing to offer for such things, but in China there is an entire "industry" based on this, including the manufacturers of mobile phone accessories.
Huawei. Even former Apple employees do not escape the interrogations, one who wanted to work for the Chinese company was questioned about the products under development at Apple during an interview for a job. Basically, Huawei tries to steal everything it can from the competition, and from here we can understand what "innovation" means in China, and it is very possible that this dirty strategy goes beyond mobile phones.
