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Court punishes Hewlett-Packard for under paying sales rep……. SINGAPORE — A retrenched sales product specialist with IT firm Hewlett-Packard (HP) is entitled to about S$600,000 in incentives for winning back a client, the High Court has ruled. In a judgment made public today (Aug 5), Judicial Commissioner Edmund Leow ruled that Ms Corinna Chin Shu Hwa had helped win back electronic payments provider NETS as a customer for the Singapore subsidiary of HP, and the contract fell within the definition of “new business” for HP. NETS was a HP customer but decided in late 2010 to buy IBM servers. The platform-migration process ran into problems and Ms Chin and her colleagues tried to woo NETS back in 2011 by, among other things, refusing to extend maintenance services for the existing servers unless NETS inked a new contract with HP. This put pressure on NETS’ planned migration to the IBM servers, and it eventually ordered new HP servers in a March 2012 contract worth about S$5.38 million. HP had argued that the NETS contract failed to meet the criteria for new business, and paid Ms Chin S$229,370.60 in incentives when it retrenched her in June 2012. JC Leow ruled that HP’s meaning of “new end user customer” – part of how sales specialists’ performances were assessed from November 2011 – was ambiguous. The justice of the case demands that the company bear the risk of this ambiguity, he added. “In terms of sales, NETS had been lost as a customer” when it decided to buy IBM servers in late 2010, the judge wrote. Although NETS’ platform migration was from existing HP servers to new HP ones, it was because NETS was won back as a customer before the migration process was complete, and was hence not a “technology refresh contract”, JC Leow noted. “Therefore, NETS was a ‘win back’ – i.e. a new end user customer – when it signed a contract for HP’s NonStop Blades servers in March 2012”, and was considered “new business”, he ruled. And as Ms Chin was involuntarily terminated in June 2012 before the end of HP’s financial year, the calculation of her incentive pay should be on a pro-rated basis rather than a full-year basis, JC Leow said. http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/court-orders-hewlett-packard-pay-retrenched-sales-specialist-about-s627000 http://www.stjobs.sg/career-resources/money-matters/former-exec-sues-hp-for-more-than-600000/a/159351