Don Durfee reports for Reuters, “One week after the apparent suicide of a Chinese factory worker accused of stealing a carefully guarded Apple iPhone prototype, one question remains unanswered: what happened to the missing phone?”
“Sun Danyong, the 25-year-old suicide victim who worked at contract cellphone maker Foxconn International’s massive gray and white factory complex in Dongguan, had 16 prototypes of Apple’s new fourth-generation iPhone in his possession, according to the Taiwanese company,” Durfee reports.
“When one went missing, Foxconn’s security guards raided his apartment, according to a report in the People’s Daily,” Durfee reports. “The phone didn’t turn up.”
Durfee reports, “A likely answer, according to security experts, is that the device ended up in the hands of Shenzhen’s notoriously entrepreneurial counterfeiters. ‘The copying of prototypes certainly happens a lot in the electronics and IT industries,’ said Dane Chamorro, a regional general manager with Control Risks, a corporate investigations consulting firm. ‘You don’t have to steal them, you just have to borrow one for a day.’”
Durfee reports, “In an earlier interview with the New York Times, Foxconn’s general manager for China said that Mr. Sun had previously lost products ‘several times’ before getting them back again.”
“According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 81 percent of all counterfeit goods seized at the U.S. border were from China… The copying takes several forms. In some cases, companies copy phones already on the market. In others, local suppliers of foreign companies run extra shifts and sell the surplus goods on the side. Then there are the designs that get stolen even before production,” Durfee reports. “This last form may be the most damaging, since it undermines costly efforts to build anticipation about upcoming products
Read more in the full article here.
[Attribution: Edible Apple.]
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