Huawei and Futurewei Defeated an Ex-employee’s Motion to Dismiss in A Non-Compete Lawsuit (Oct. 2, 2018, U.S. District Court in Texas)

In 2011, Futurewei, a US subsidiary of the Chinese technology giant Huawei (collectively “Plaintiffs”), employed Yiren Ronnie Huang (“Ronnie”) as a Principal Engineer to assist in development of Solid-State Drive (“SSD”) and relevant high-tech fields. Ronnie signed an employment contract containing non-disclosure, non-compete and non-solicitation clauses. Plaintiffs alleged that despite his access to confidential information at Futurewei, Ronnie left the company in 2013 and opened his own company-CNEX Labs, which directly competes with Plaintiffs. Ronnie used Plaintiffs’ confidential information to improve SSD related technologies for CNEX and file patent applications and solicited employees from Plaintiffs. In December 2017, Plaintiffs sued Defendants for tortuous interference with business and unfair competition. Defendants moved to dismiss the case on the grounds of Plaintiffs’ failure to state a claim. On October 2, the Court denied Defendants’ motion on the grounds that Plaintiffs’ complaint had contained sufficient factual matter that, if accepted as true, had stated a plausible claim. The proceedings in this case will continue.
Written by Derek Tai