Semiconductor startup CNEX Labs alleged Huawei’s deputy chairman conspired to steal its intellectual property

A San Jose-based semiconductor startup being sued by Huawei for stealing trade secrets has hit back in court documents, accusing the Chinese firm’s deputy chairman of conspiring to steal its intellectual property, reports the Wall Street Journal. In court filings, CNEX Labs, which is backed by the investment arms of Dell and Microsoft, alleges that Eric Xu, who is also one of Huawei’s rotating CEOs, worked with other Huawei employees to steal its proprietary technology.

The lawsuit, set for trial on June 3 in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas, started in 2017 when Huawei sued CNEX and one of its founders, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a former employee at Huawei’s Santa Clara office, for stealing its technology and using unlawful means to poach 14 other Huawei employees. CNEX filed a countersuit the following year. Huawei has denied the startup’s allegations in court filings.

The lawsuit is happening at a fraught time for Huawei. Last week, the Chinese telecom equipment maker (and the world’s second-largest smartphone brand), was placed on a trade blacklist by the Trump administration, which also signed an executive order that would make it possible to block American companies from doing business with Huawei and other companies it deems a national security threat. As a result, several companies have suspended business with Huawei, including Google, Qualcomm, Intel and ARM.

Court filings said that after being directed by Xu to analyze CNEX’s technical information, a Huawei engineer met with the startup’s officials in June 2016, pretending to be a potential customer. But then the engineer produced a report about CNEX’s tech and put it into a database of information about competitors run by Huawei’s chip development unit.

CNEX’s lawyers also say that Xu knew about a partnership between Huawei and Xiamen University that was allegedly part of plan to steal the startup’s trade secrets. They claim Xiamen obtained a memory board from CNEX in 2017 under a licensing agreement, saying it would be used for academic research. But CNEX lawyer Eugene Mar said that “what was hidden from CNEX was that Xiamen was working with Huawei and had entered into an agreement separately with Huawei to provide them with all of their research test reports,” according to court transcripts viewed by the Wall Street Journal.

Information from the university’s study was then allegedly used for Huawei chip projects, including one that is expected to be released this year. Huawei’s lawyers refuted CNEX’s charges, claiming that the partnership between Huawei and the university did not involve reverse engineering or CNEX’s trade secrets and was meant to design database software instead of developing chips. A Huawei lawyer said that Xu was part of “the chain of command that had requested” information about CNEX and that a CNEX document had been placed into its chip development unit’s database, but denied allegations that anything was stolen.

CNEX co-founder Huang claimed in court filings that he offered to sell his intellectual property to Huawei when he started working at Futurewei, its research and development unit. Huawei refused his offer, but then later tried to get Huang to give them his IP under an employee agreement, which Huang refused to sign, he claims. Huang left Futurewei in 2013 and founded CNEX Labs soon after.