“When a closely guarded prototype of a new Apple iPhone went missing at a huge factory here two weeks ago, an internal investigation focused on a shy, 25-year-old employee named Sun Danyong,” David Barboza reports for The New York Times.
“Mr. Sun, a college graduate working in the logistics department, denied stealing the iPhone. But he later complained to friends that he had been beaten and humiliated by the factory’s security team. On the night he was questioned, he sent an anguished text message to his girlfriend,” Barboza reports. “Soon after, in the early-morning hours of July 16, Mr. Sun apparently jumped to his death from the 12th floor of an apartment building in what his employer, Foxconn Technology, says was a suicide.”
Barboza reports, “The case also underscores the challenges that global companies face in trying to safeguard their designs and intellectual property in the hotly contested smartphone market, particularly here in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, an electronics manufacturing center known for piracy and counterfeiting. Apple’s popular iPhone is already widely imitated and counterfeited in China. And there are regular rumors on Chinese Web sites about new Apple prototypes leaking out of Chinese factories.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
