T-Mobile USA has sued Huawei Technologies, claiming the Chinese company stole its software, specifications and other secrets for a phone-testing robot named Tappy, the Seattle Times reports. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Seattle, T-Mobile said employees of Huawei illicitly photographed the device, tried to smuggle components out of T-Mobile’s Bellevue lab, and, when banned from the facility, tried to sneak back in. Huawei, which is no longer a T-Mobile phone supplier, used the information to build its own testing robot, and now is "using T-Mobile’s stolen robot technology to test non-T-Mobile handsets and improve return rates for handsets developed and sold to other carriers", according to the suit.
A Huawei spokesman acknowledged some inappropriate actions by two company employees and said they’d been fired. Huawei rejects the broader claims in the suit, however.
T-Mobile doesn’t specify the damages it is seeking, but claims that because of Huawei’s industrial espionage, it had to spend "at least tens of millions of dollars" switching to other handsets. The suit also claims Huawei profited from using the robot testing technology to improve its phones, "gains that are estimated to benefit Huawei by hundreds of millions of dollars".
