Ex-Huawei semiconductor secret thieves sentenced to jail

• 14 ex-Huawei workers have been sentenced to jail over secret theft
• Former engineers went on to work at Wi-Fi chip startup Zunpai
• Huawei has been on both sides of the IP legal fence

A Shanghai court has sentenced 14 former Huawei employees to jail for stealing chip-related business secrets, sending ripples across the industry not just in China but also globally.

The employees worked for Zunpai Communication Technology – a startup founded be engineers from HiSilicon, a Huawei unit.

The court issued jail terms of up to six years and imposed further financial penalties in a July 28 ruling which landed in Huawei's favor.

Shanghai court jails former Huawei engineers over secret stealing

After leaving Huawei in 2019, Zhang Kun, a former researcher at HiSilicon, founded Zunpai in 2021 and hired former coworkers. The startup was accused of using proprietary information by Huawei, despite the fact that the company developed Wi-Fi communication chips.

According to court documents from August 2023, the Huawei subsidiary requested that the Shanghai Intellectual Property court freeze assets under Zunpai and its subsidiaries valued at 95 million yuan.

The court's decision has not been made public online, and Huawei has not made any public remarks regarding the case. According to a South China Morning Post report, the engineers may still have grounds to challenge the decision.

More broadly, it reflect a growing commitment in China toward protecting IP, with China's Supreme People's Procuratorate stating that 21,000 people were criminally prosecuted for IP crimes in 2024 alone, including a nine-year sentence for criminal copyright infringement of Lego bricks (via National Law Review).

For Huawai, though, it represents a reversal of roles. In 2019, the Shenzhen tech giant was indicted on ten counts of stealing Western technology, attempting to steal secrets, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice.

TechRadar Pro has contacted Huawei for a comment, but we did not receive an immediate response.

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