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Chinese smartphone maker, Huawei, has demoted two employees for using an iPhone to send a New Year message on behalf of the company on Twitter.
The tweet, which has since been deleted, was mocked for being published “via Twitter for iPhone.” The company then had to punish two workers responsible for the gaffe.
Huawei, which recently overtook iPhone maker, Apple, to become the second biggest smartphone vendor in the world, found it rather embarrassing that it appears to be using devices of its major rival.
It has however been gathered that the tweet in question was posted by a marketing agency Huawei hired to handle its social media accounts overseas. But Bloomberg reports that Huawei “came down hard” on two of its own workers involved in the ‘mishap’. One of the workers was head of Huawei’s digital marketing team.
The workers received salary deductions of 5,000 yuan (approx. $730) a month, as well as a single-level demotion.
According to Cult of Mac, a memo circulated among staff members stated that employees must “tighten management of suppliers and partners,” and said “the incident exposed flaws in our processes and management.”
Newspeakonline can report that Huawei is not the first to suffer this kind of slip-ups but it seems to be the first to punish its workers for it. Samsung and Apple have also made the same mistakes. While Samsung’s marketing agencies been caught posting tweets from an iPhone in recent months, Apple’s partners have also published social media updates using Android.