A senior executive of one of the mainland's top three mobile-phone handset manufacturers appeared to have committed a public-relations faux pas par excellence yesterday, when he was caught in possession of a Motorola mobile phone at a press conference.
The conditions of his breach were made somewhat less onerous by the fact his company, Eastern Communications (Eastcom), is actually in a joint-venture partnership with the United States giant.
However, reporters still challenged Eastcom chief financial officer and executive vice-president Wang Zhongxiong as to why he wasn't using an Eastcom handset. He was launching the brand in Hong Kong after all. Wasn't the Eastcom handset as good as the Motorola?
'No, quite the opposite. It's because our phones are so great that I don't have one. Mine was taken away by someone and that's why I have to use this one,' Mr Wang said.
Concern the Hangzhou-based executive may have been the victim of a mugging by a trend-crazed Hong Kong teen was soon put to rest. It seems the mugger was none other than BNP Paribas Peregrine Capital chairman Alex Ko, who had clapped his eyes on the company's latest GPRS model, a pearlescent ivory-coloured flip-top, dual-screen number, capable of displaying 4,096 colours and still the size of a business card.
This would have put the top investment banker back about 2,000 yuan (about HK$1,874), probably what his amah vacuums up in spare change every day.