Starting on November 4, several retail chains in Vietnam began removing Chinese-branded smartphones, including Oppo, vivo, Xiaomi, Honor, Meizu, Tecno and Nubia, from their display shelves.

A leaked internal notice from one retail chain revealed that all demonstration units from Chinese smartphone brands had to be removed from display.

Commercial products, including both opened and unopened devices, as well as second-hand phones, were also ordered to be taken off display and placed in storage.

Stores were additionally instructed to stop accepting used phones and remove all advertising materials related to these brands.

Sources from the retail chains said the removal was intended to investigate errors in the display of sovereignty information concerning the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa archipelagos on the weather applications of some of the Chinese smartphone brands mentioned above.

A marketing representative of a Chinese smartphone manufacturer also confirmed the incident.

According to the representative, when users searched for the Truong Sa and Hoang Sa archipelagos (which belong to Vietnam) through the weather application on the company's smartphones, the results displayed completely incorrect sovereignty information. After discovering the issue, the company quickly released an update to fix the problem, and the situation is now under control.

"This is a third-party application, not one developed by our company. As soon as we became aware of the incident, we worked closely with the relevant parties and implemented the necessary measures to resolve the issue completely. As of now, the problem has been fixed," the representative said.

According to VietNamNet's findings, the issue originated from a weather application called AccuWeather, provided by a US media company offering commercial weather forecasting services worldwide.

When the application is installed on a smartphone of any brand, searching for the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa archipelagos (which belong to Vietnam) on its map produces completely incorrect information that seriously violates Vietnam's sovereignty over its seas and islands. The same incorrect information is currently displayed on the application's website.

Some Chinese smartphone manufacturers have used data from this application in products marketed internationally, resulting in the incorrect information being displayed as described above.

Le My