Huawei has demoted and cut the pay of two of its employees after an iPhone was used to send a New Year’s greeting from the company’s official Twitter account. In a memo seen by both Reuters and Bloomberg, the company’s corporate senior vice president Chen Lifang said that the incident had “caused damage to the Huawei brand.” In addition to the demotion and a 5,000 yuan (around $728) monthly pay cut, the January 3rd memo said that one of the employees would also see their pay rank frozen for 12 months.
The internal memo says that the incident occurred after its external social media agency, Sapient, experienced “VPN problems” with its PC. VPNs allow access to Twitter from inside China. As a workaround, an iPhone fitted with a foreign SIM...