(Yicai Global) Feb. 25 -- Weimob's stock price ended the day higher after trading lower in the morning following a statement from the Chinese technology services company that said an employee had sabotaged its software-as-a-service business, but the outage would be "temporary."

Shares of Weimob [HKG:2013] dropped as much as 6.7 percent in morning trade and climbed as much 5.6 percent this afternoon before settling 4.2 percent higher at HKD6.18 (79 US cents).

It became aware of a technical issue with its SaaS business two days ago and yesterday discovered it was "sabotaged by a key operation and maintenance employee" leading to "the current temporary unavailability" to customers, the Shanghai-based firm said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange late yesterday.

The impact of the sabotage on the firm's finances "will be subject to the extent and speed of the restoration," it said. In the first half of last year, the CNY177 million (USD25.2 million) gross profit at Weimob's SaaS business represented 48.5 percent of the total.

SaaS is a licensing means where subscribers can access software located on external servers rather than purchased and downloaded onto their own.

Weimob is actively working on restoring the service, it added. The firm expects the SaaS production environment to be repaired before midnight local time today and data for existing clients to be restored before the end of Feb. 28.

The saboteur suffers from personal mental and life issues, the company said, without further detailing the employee's actions. The employee has been detained by the police after Weimob reported the incident.

Offering varied solutions for smart retail, restaurants, hotels and entertainment, Weimob is China's leading provider of cloud business and marketing services, mainly for small and medium-sized companies, information on its website shows. It has more than 3 million registered merchants, including Walmart and Lenovo.

The company is drawing up a plan to compensate merchants who have suffered losses from the outage, Weimob said. It made no mention of either the merchants affected or the amount of compensation the firm proposes to pay.

Editor: Ben Armour