And Twitter always mentions what platform has been used to send the tweet, so the New Year tweet from Huawei’s Twitter account had “via Twitter for iPhone” written right under it. As soon as the company realised that this happened, the tweet was deleted. However, by then, screenshots of it had already gone viral on the microblogging website.
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) January 1, 2019 We should tell you that Huawei took this matter very seriously. According to Reuters, an internal memo was circulated on January 3 in the company which quoted corporate senior vice-president and director of the board Chen Lifang saying, “the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand.” According to Huawei’s memo, the mistake happened when a social media handler Sapient, who was outsourced by the company faced issues with VPN for accessing Twitter via desktop, so instead tweeted from an iPhone with a roaming SIM card to send the tweet on time at midnight. The Chinese firewall doesn’t let any foreign services like Facebook, Google, and Twitter work in the country. SO, in order to gain access to these web platforms, people have to use a virtual private network (VPN) connection. It is also worth noticing that Huawei overtook Apple as the second-largest smartphone vendor by volume from January to September. So, the company does consider Apple to be one among its rivals and says that its flagship Mate 20 series competes directly with Apple’s offerings. As of now, neither Huawei nor Sapient have commented on the matter. However, in the memo, Huawei did say that the incident showed procedural incompliance and problems in management. The company also stated that it has demoted two employees who were responsible for the tweet by one ran and reduced their monthly salaries by 5,000 yuan. The pay rank of Huawei’s digital marketing director has been frozen for 12 months, the company said in the memo.
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