Apple continues the Chinese Phonemaker Oppo for the theft of alleged trade secrets

Apple is pursuing a Chinese public electronics company Oppo For poaching A member of the Apple Watch team of the Cupertino giant to steal commercial secrets.

Apple, represented by lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis, brought the trial against the former architect of the company’s sensor system, Dr. Cheng Shi, and its new OPPO employers, based in China and Innopeak, based in California.

Dr. Shi is now leading a team developing a detection technology at the US Oppo office, according to a complaint filed by Apple Thursday in the North District of California.

What is Shi accused of doing?

Dr. Shi was a very paid engineer in Apple between January 2020 and June 2025 where Apple said that he had “a first rank for Apple development of its cutting -edge health sensor technology, including highly confidential roadmaps, design and development documents and specifications for ECG sensor technology”, which helps measure the cardiac activity of Apple Watch watches.

Apple accuses Dr. Shi of downloading 63 confidential documents on the company’s shared campaign for employees to a USB player only three days before leaving. The documents would have included sensitive information on the technological capacities of products still to be published and “technical specifications concerning the hardware and software implementations” of Apple sensor products as the temperature sensors in its Apple Watch offers.

Before downloading the documents from Apple’s shared reader on his MacBook, Dr Shi’s Internet research history would have revealed that he had sought “how to erase MacBook” and “Can someone see if I opened a file on a shared reader?”

Apple also claims that Dr. Shi stole confidential technical information to the team that develops Apple’s personalized fleas. Apple develops its own personalized silicon chips for its Mac, iPhone and iPad products. The company has also been working on the design of personalized AI chips for some time now, and the effort is considered the key to the CEO Tim Cook Revision of AI.

Oppo is known for his high -tech smartphones, and the The company in China obtained online heat in 2020 for having published what many considered An Apple Watch clone.

OPPO smartphones, although Ano still correspond to Apple’s iPhones, are remarkably successful in Asian markets, in particular in China, one of Apple’s largest markets.

With Huawei and Xiaomi, Oppo has eneerated the market share in Apple China, which dropped Apple from the list of five best smartphones suppliers in China in 2024. But the technology giant recently started to transform this story: iPhone sales increased in China first in China, Reuters reported in June.

Although Oppo does not do business in the United States, the company has and operates a “research center” in Silicon Valley under the names of Oppo and Innopeak, according to the complaint.

Oppo has not yet responded to the request for comments from Gizmodo.

What does Apple say.

Apple underlines the evidence of the phone issued at the work of Dr. Shi, who would have shown his communications with the senior management of the OPPO of April 2025 until his Apple left at the end of June.

“This week, I will inform my team from my resignation,” he wrote in the messages included in the trial. “Lately, I also examined various internal materials and made many meetings 1: 1 in order to collect as much information as possible – will share with you all later.”

During the month preceding his Apple departure, Dr. Shi would have planned 33 individual meetings covering projects in which he was not involved, against an average of seven per month a year earlier.

Then, when he resigned at the end of the month, Dr. Shi did not tell colleagues that he would start working in Oppo, but rather said that he “returned to China to take care of his elderly parents and did not intend to ask for a new job,” said complaint.

Apple is looking for an injunction prohibiting OPPO from using Apple’s trade secrets and asking the court to grant restitution and damages of an amount to be determined at the trial.