HTC has been struggling in the mobile business. What used to be a major player in the industry still has an uncertain future especially that President and CEO Yves Maitre has recently resigned. Reasons were mainly personal but this change would definitely have an impact on the company. Maitre was named CEO September last year. His leaving made Cher Wang, its current Chairwoman and co-founder, assuming his place. The past months have been difficult for everyone, including Maitre, who has been away from his family.
The former CEO’s decision was a difficult one but the board had to accept it. The French executive, who was formerly an exec at Orange, was only CEO at the Taiwanese tech giant for less than a year. He has been up for the challenge of helping the brand into a new season.
Maitre has always been honest about the situation. When he took on the job, he mentioned that the company “made a timing mistake” and that HTC is paying for it. He recognized the brand still has many assets in terms of “innovation, team and balance sheets”.
The CEO’s reasons to leave the company were personal. He has been away from his family most of the time, no thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Travel restrictions were in place.
Maitre has been hard at work to drive the HTC back to a good place. We remember him asking the consumers what classic phone would be good to resurrect. He tried to improve on the VR presence of HTC by working on the Vive Cosmos family.
We started to expect the HTC 5G phone and a new HTC Vive. Because revenue was down by half compared to previous year, some changes were made like the Elevate community program being discontinued. Q2 2020 for HTC was still bad. It saw another quarterly loss (NT$1.83 billion) which is also another decline from the previous quarter.