Huawei has demoted two employees over a Twitter update sent from an iPhone.
The New Year message, which has since been deleted, was mocked for being published “via Twitter for iPhone.” But Huawei isn’t the only smartphone maker that’s been caught using a rival’s devices.
Huawei has become one of Apple’s biggest competitors, recently overtaking the iPhone-maker to become the number two smartphone vendor in the world. It’s rather embarrassing, then, when the company appears to be using Apple devices.
At least one of its recent tweets was sent from an iPhone, and although it wasn’t technically Huawei’s fault, the company has punished two workers for the gaffe.
Huawei won’t accept marketing mixups
As suspected, the tweet in question was posted by a marketing agency Huawei hired to handle its social media accounts overseas. But the company “came down hard” on two of its own workers involved in the snafu, Bloomberg reports.
Both received salary deductions of 5,000 yuan (approx. $730) a month, as well as a single-level demotion. One of the employees was head of Huawei’s digital marketing team, according to an internal memo circulated among a number of teams.
The memo also stated that employees must “tighten management of suppliers and partners,” and said “the incident exposed flaws in our processes and management.”
Huawei not the first
Huawei isn’t the first to suffer this kind of oversight. Samsung’s marketing partners have also been caught posting tweets from an iPhone in recent months, and even Apple’s partners have previously used Android to publish social media updates.
Given that these slip-ups make headlines, and lead to ridicule for the companies involved, it’s surprising that they continue to happen. Huawei seems to be the first to have taken big steps to prevent it, but it probably won’t be the last.
