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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

About a dozen years ago I was working for a small-ish hardware company ($350-400M revenue), which was acquired by a bigger company. BiggerCo had a Joint Venture with Huawei (let’s called it JVco).

About 6 months Post acquisition one of our employees found that Huawei was selling a 100% complete rip-off of one of our products. JVco had access to some of our development resources, but Huawei was never supposed to see any of that per the agreements.

The box looked, acted, and functioned the same - all they did was localize the language, barely rebrand it, and repackage our weekly updates for their customers the day after we released them.

Legal from BiggerCo got involved, and it was all papered over as a ‘misunderstanding’ by the Joint Venture company. Haven’t trusted a thing with their name on it or any company that does business with them since...

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Kind of makes you wonder why Boeing would build a finishing plant in Zhoushan and Apple would put so much of its iPhone production in Zhengzhou and Shenzhen.

China is Boeing's second largest market, and it will probably become Boeing's largest market in the next decade.[1]

In these discussions decrying how terribly the Chinese treat foreign companies, I see very little acknowledgment of how much money foreign companies have earned both by selling to the Chinese market, and by exploiting cheap labor in China.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-17/boeing-se...

Because its cheap, if you only look at the immediate profit without considering the long term implications

The long term implications have been that American companies are richer than ever before.

What about longer than that. In GPs case what if Huawei outcompetes with stolen IP?

> The long term implications have been that American companies are richer than ever before.

That's medium term. Long term is Comac and Huawei drive down Boeing and Apple's market share until they're bit players in their industries (or go out of business altogether).

Aren't Tesla also building in China?

They are, but the factory is fully owned and operated by Tesla, not the usual 51% Chinese 49% American joint venture that was the norm until the recent trade fight.

They have a Gigafactory in China. Cars made in China stay there.

Not so sure about IP used in this (or other) factory though..

I am willing to bet every piece of equipment bound for that factory is inspected by Chinese engineers for interestingness. The plant is imaged during down time for documentation of any other interestingness.

Apple have been there for quite some time, they’re probably happy enough with the trade off.

Apple is so far gone in the closed ecosystem game, they're pretty much impossible to copy.

Whoa there - you're making an implication I didn't make. At no point in my story did I claim that all Chinese people or companies were slimy, just one.

That culture may or may not be more pravalent in China than it is in the US, but this particular story doesn't claim either way.

Because it is often the only way to gain entrance into the Chinese market.

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