Stefan Mileschin

In what is a bad week for the Chinese mobile phone company ZTE, the company has reported a $279.2 million loss.

The loss applies to the first nine months of months of 2012, and it made a statement of its preliminary results announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange yesterday.

ZTE said the company had suffered as a slowing economy has hurt sales and margins have come under pressure.

ZTE warned that the fall in profits will be more than 260 percent compared with the same period last year.

According to Reuters, the company is due to report final results at the end of the October

A lot of the problems were caused by the Iranian market which the company is not really supposed to have. The United States is investigating the company over the sale of banned US computer equipment to Iran, which could be used to monitor landline, mobile and Internet communications.

ZTE said it is cooperating with US authorities, but it has already lost its sales contract with Cisco over the deal. It also got into hot water after a company whistleblower claimed that the outfit started shredding documents the moment it was exposed by the press.

Iran is under global sanctions because of allegations it is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

In just seven days, bot only did it lose Cisco, but it was also accused by a US government committee of being a potential security threat. On the whole it looks like what Her Majesty might have called a Septimana horribilis, even though it is October.

http://news.techeye.net/mobile/zte-reports-loss