Apple is suing Chinese consumer electronics company Oppo for poaching a member of the Cupertino giant’s Apple Watch team to allegedly steal trade secrets.
Apple, represented by lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis, is bringing the lawsuit against the company’s former sensor system architect Dr. Cheng Shi, and his new employers China-based Oppo and California-based Innopeak.
Dr. Shi now leads a team developing sensing technology at Oppo’s U.S. office, according to a complaint filed by Apple on Thursday in the Northern District of California.
What is Shi accused of doing?
Dr. Shi was a highly paid engineer at Apple between January 2020 and June 2025 where Apple says he had “a front row seat to Apple’s development of its cutting-edge health sensor technology, including highly confidential roadmaps, design and development documents, and specifications for ECG sensor technology,” which helps Apple Watches measure heart activity, according to the complaint.
Apple accuses Dr. Shi of downloading 63 confidential documents on the company’s shared drive for employees to a USB drive just three days before leaving. The documents allegedly included sensitive information on the technological capabilities of yet to be released products and “technical specifications concerning hardware and software implementations” of Apple’s sensor products like temperature sensors in its Apple Watch offerings.
Before downloading the documents from Apple’s shared drive onto his Macbook, Dr. Shi’s internet search history allegedly revealed that he looked up “how to wipe out macbook” and “Can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?”
Apple also claims that Dr. Shi stole confidential technical information from the team that is developing Apple’s custom chips. Apple develops its own custom silicon chips for its Mac, iPhone, and iPad products. The company has also been working on designing custom AI chips for some time now, and the effort is considered key to CEO Tim Cook’s AI overhaul.
Oppo is known for its high-tech smartphones, and the China-based company got some heat online back in 2020 for releasing what many deemed an Apple Watch clone.
Oppo’s smartphones, although ano match yet to Apple’s iPhones, do remarkably well in Asian markets, particularly in China, one of Apple’s largest markets.
Along with Huawei and Xiaomi, Oppo has eaten away at Apple’s China market share, causing Apple to fall off from the list of top five smartphone vendors in China in 2024. But the tech giant has recently started turning this narrative around: iPhone sales rose to the top spot in China in May, Reuters reported in June citing preliminary third-party data, driving an overall increase in global sales for Apple.
Although Oppo does not do business in the U.S., the company does own and operate a “research center” in Silicon Valley under both Oppo and Innopeak’s names, according to the complaint.
Oppo has not yet responded to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
What does Apple say happened?
Apple points to evidence from Dr. Shi’s work-issued phone, which allegedly shows his communications with Oppo senior leadership from April 2025 to until he left Apple at the end of June.
“This week I’ll inform my team about my resignation,” he allegedly wrote in messages included in the lawsuit. “Lately, I’ve also been reviewing various internal materials and doing a lot of 1:1 meetings in an effort to collect as much information as possible – will share with you all later.”
In the month before he left Apple, Dr. Shi allegedly scheduled 33 one-on-one meetings covering projects he was not involved in, compared to an average of seven per month a year earlier.
Then when he did resign at the end of the month, Dr. Shi did not tell colleagues that he would begin work at Oppo, but instead said that he was “returning to China to tend to his elderly parents and had no plans to seek new employment,” according to the complaint.
Apple is seeking an injunction prohibiting Oppo from using Apple’s trade secrets, and is asking the court to award restitution and damages in an amount to be determined at trial.
