HTC seriously cannot catch a break. News
broke recently that several high level designers from within the
company were arrested and interrogated for fraudulent spending and
stealing trade secrets. Vice President of Product Design Thomas
Chien, R&D director Wu Chien Hung, and the guy personally
responsible for sketching the One’s design, Justin Huang, were some of
the big names involved in the scandal. HTC chairwoman Cher Wang found
out that those three employees were planning on leaving HTC to start a
new design company, “Xiaoyu,” which has already been trademarked in
China by the three. Of course, they weren’t planning on leaving HTC
until receiving their mid-year bonus checks. Ouch.
Of course, leaving a company isn’t illegal.
But what really set HTC off what that Thomas Chien was allegedly caught
downloading some files pertaining to Sense 6.0 (which HTC declined to
comment on) and then emailing those files to a third party. I would
think most people would be smart enough to know not to do anything
incriminating over something as easily monitored as email, but what do I
know?
During the investigation, some fraud came
up. Supposedly, those three big names used an external design firm to
invoice HTC $334,000 bucks in commission for the design of the HTC One,
despite the fact that it was done in house. They then split the
commission among themselves.
This is definitely a pretty bleak turn of
events for HTC, but they’ve weathered the storm decently up until now.
Hopefully this won’t be anything than a bump in the road for the
company.
source: Engadget
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