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As Huawei's challenge to its western rivals mounts, the Chinese firm is finding itself increasingly in the firing line. Not only is it facing significant hurdles to major contracts from US and Indian authorities, but last week Motorola filed a lawsuit accusing it of stealing confidential information. And now, reports have surfaced that Nokia Siemens plans to break a joint development deal with Huawei for TD-LTE and go it alone.

Huawei has denied any involvement in a plan that lies at the heart of the legal challenge, which alleges that the Chinese vendor helped a group of former Motorola staff to steal information, and use it to set up their own company in competition with MOT. Last week, a modified lawsuit claimed that former employee Shao Wei Pan secretly reported to Ren Zhengfei, Huawei's founder and chairman, while he was working at the US firm.

According to the lawsuit, the former employees were working on a micro base station project and passed technical details to Huawei, then setting up their own company, Lemoko. "The complaint is groundless and utterly without merit. Huawei has no relationship with Lemoko, other than a reseller agreement," a spokesman told official news agency, China. "Huawei will vigorously defend itself against baseless allegations."

Huawei went on, with a veiled threat of countersuit. "As an active and significant player in global standards setting bodies, Huawei has great respect for the right of intellectual property holders, and will with equal vigor protect its own hard earned intellectual property rights," the company said. Some analysts speculated that the timing of the lawsuit was a tactic to try to put customers off switching allegiance to Huawei, especially in the US, amid the uncertainty of the sale of Motorola's wireless equipment business to Nokia Siemens.

NSN is also distancing itself from Huawei, according to its Greater China Region president, Zhang Zhiqiang. He said in a recent interview that the company would develop its own TD-LTE technology in future, which would end a long established joint venture with Huwaei, TD Tech, set up in 2005. TD-LTE is the standard largely created for China Mobile but also gaining acceptance for TDD spectrum elsewhere. Unlike NSN, Motorola has a headstart in this technology, thanks to its experience in another TDD standard, WiMAX, and runs China Mobile's showcase network at Shanghai Expo, along with Alcatel-Lucent. It is unclear what will happen to another alliance, that between Huawei and Motorola for W-CDMA, created when the US firm existed the W-CDMA business in its own right.

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