Apple who are unclear whether consumers will upgrade to their new iPhone 15 during the holiday period, has moved to cut costs, by slashing pay rises, it also appears that the Company is being sued by a US Company who claims the tech giant forces employees to sign restrictive agreements that prevent them from working elsewhere should they decide to quite Apple.
A countersuit filed at the weekend by Rivos and six ex-Apple employees in a US court escalates an acrimonious trade secret feud that began when Apple last year sued Rivos and former employees who joined the startup.
Rivos is pushing back by asking the court to rule that Apple’s “overbroad” non-disclosure and non-solicit agreements are unenforceable.“Afraid of any threat of legitimate competition in the marketplace and hoping to frighten and send a message to any employees who might dare to leave Apple to work somewhere else, Apple has resorted to trying to thwart emerging startups through anticompetitive measures, including illegally restricting employee mobility,” Rivos said in its countersuit.
An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Apple accused the startup and the employees in a lawsuit of luring away its engineers and stealing proprietary information used to develop its homegrown chip designs. The dispute revolves around “system-on-chip” technology that shrinks multiple computer elements into a small chip, which Apple says it has invested billions of dollars in to make its devices more powerful.
Rivos claims Apple’s Intellectual Property Agreement that Apple employees sign as condition of employment are “expansive as to cover anything ‘learned’ during the course of employment, regardless of whether it is a trade secret.” The agreement includes, a non-solicitation provision, “which is designed to, and Apple uses to, chill employee mobility and competition,” Rivos said in its countersuit.
Apple, the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $2.755 trillion, has reported three straight quarters of falling revenue.
The company has also taken a hit from declining sales of its iPhone.
Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks in a video at the iPhone 15 launch
In the third quarter, sales of the smartphone slipped 2.94% to $39.7 billion in the third quarter, just shy of the $39.8 billion analysts were expecting.
Now costs are being reviewed and that includes salaries. The only problem is that employees who do want to leave could be restricted as to where they can work.
Apple sued Gerard Williams III, who left his job as lead chip architect at Apple and co-founded a chip startup Nuvia, for trade secrets theft in a California state court in 2019 according to Bloomberg.
Williams had lashed back in a court filing saying Apple’s lawsuit is designed to “suffocate the creation of new technologies and solutions by a new business, and to diminish the freedom of entrepreneurs to seek out more fulfilling work.”
Apple deployed the same “playbook” used against Nuvia and Williams to target Rivos, the startup claims.
In August, US District Judge Edward Davila threw out Apple’s trade secret claims against Rivos but gave the iPhone maker a chance to file a revised complaint.
