Huawei says Motorola charges of stealing trade secret groundless, newspaper

Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei Technologies said Motorola's charges of stealing confidential information about its cellular network equipment is groundless, the China Daily reported Saturday.

Motorola on Wednesday said one of its former staff engineers, who now works with a Huawei reseller called Lemko, had provided information about a new transceiver and other Motorola technology to Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei Technologies, the newspaper said.

"The complaint is groundless and utterly without merit. Huawei has no relationship with Lemoko, other than a reseller agreement," Huawei wrote in an e-mail to the newspaper, adding that it will defend themselves against these baseless allegations.

The Chinese telecom equipment company had been planning to tap into the United States market via acquisitions.

It is believed Huawei is interested in deals including a 1.2-billion-U.S. dollar Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) purchase of the wireless network assets from Motorola, and Ericssons's 1.13-billion-U.S. dollar takeover of Nortel Networks' mobile unit, according to the newspaper.

Wang Yuquan, senior consultant with research firm Frost&Sullivan China, told the newspaper that though Huawei has not been successful in its efforts in the U.S. market so far, it may gain some of the customers impacted by the NSN takeover.

Source: Xinhua