Huawei hits back at Cisco allegations

Huawei’s response comes after Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler argued in a blog post that Huawei Corporate Senior Vice President Charles Ding had misstated the facts about how Cisco’s lawsuit against the Chinese telecom company ended. Cisco had previously sued Huawei for using Cisco’s source code in its products without permission.

In the post, Chandler published a set of excerpts from an expert’s report that provided examples of Huawei infringing on various strings of Cisco’s source code. Chandler wrote that he was able to publish the excerpts because the lawsuit agreement settled between the two companies “allows either party to make a reasonable response to improper or impermissible statements by the other.” 

Ding said in public comments that no infringement was found in the suit and the source code in question was from a third party and already available online, according to Chandler.

“Mr. Ding’s statements of two weeks ago indeed misstate the facts and therefore merit a direct, factually accurate and proportionate response,” he said. 

Chandler called on Huawei to publish the expert’s final report to clarify “what actually happened in the litigation, overcome any confusion and demonstrate their purported transparent business practices and respect for intellectual property rights.” 

He issued a similar call in a blog post published last week. 

Huawei’s Plummer stood by comments Ding made during a hearing held by the House Intelligence Committee last month and slammed Chandler for publishing the report excerpts. 

“We do not believe that our witness at the recent congressional hearing violated the agreement between Cisco and Huawei, which had a negotiated confidentiality provision in it,” Plummer said. “However, Mr. Chandler’s selective and misleading cropping of a confidential report from the neutral expert may indeed have violated that provision.”

Plummer also warned that Huawei could take further action to make the details about the outcome of the suit public. 

“Since Cisco’s publication of out of context snippets of the neutral expert’s report does not accurately describe the result of the litigation, Huawei is exploring the best way to ensure that the public has a more accurate description,” Plummer said. 

The war of words with Cisco is just the latest scuffle Huawei has gotten into this week. In a report released on Monday, the House Intelligence Committee found that Huawei and ZTE pose a national security risk to the United States and recommended that the two Chinese telecom companies should be barred from doing business with American companies.  

— This post was updated at 5:45 p.m. to correct that Chandler did not state that Ding’s public comments were made at a congressional hearing.