Just before midnight on December 31, 2018, two Huawei employees sent a tweet from the company’s official account wishing a “Happy #2019 from all of us at Huawei.”
It was a nice tweet, but the problem was the employees sent it from Huawei’s official account…. with an iPhone! The tweet was quickly removed, but not before being screen-capped and widely shared on Twitter.
It was an embarrassing snafu for China’s biggest telecoms gear maker, which replaced Apple Inc as the world’s No. 2 smartphone brand in 2018 and is now gunning for the top spot.
While Huawei blamed the faux pas on an agency it hired to handle social media overseas, the company also came down hard on the two workers. has decided to punish
the two employees involved in the tweet by docking their monthly salaries by
5,000 yuan (about $730 a month) as well as demoting them a level in the
company’s hierarchy.
One of the workers punished for the mix-up
is the head of Huawei’s digital marketing team. Besides shaming the two
employees involved, the memo also said Huawei departments must now “tighten
management of suppliers and partners” after “the incident exposed flaws in our
processes and management.”
Huawei declined to comment for
this story.
From Bloomberg News (Edited)
