14 DAY TRIAL // Although HTC has recently launched its new flagship smartphone, the U Ultra, the exodus of top executives from the Taiwanese company continues.
Jason Mackenzie, HTC's Global Vice President, has just announced that this is his last day at the company. While Mackenzie did not say why he's leaving the company and where he's going after that, he did thank Peter Chou, the company's ex-CEO, as well as Cher Wang, the current CEO of the company.
For those who don't know, Jason Mackenzie was for a long time the President of North American operations at HTC, but in the last year or so, he has been promoted to executive vice president, which allowed him to supervise the global operations of the company.
Mackenzie's announcement is quite surprising since it comes just days after HTC's head of design, the man responsible for HTC One's design, Claude Zellweger confirmed he would join Google's Daydream team starting February.
These “purges” are a clear sign that HTC is looking to downsize its staff and streamline global operations in the months to come.
The Taiwanese company's mobile division has been losing money for a few years now, which is one of the reasons ex-CEO Peter Chou had to step down.
Unfortunately, the new CEO, Cher Wang, hasn't been able to steer the HTC ship, which seems about to sink any moment now. The handset maker denied rumors that it plans to sell its smartphone business, but we now believe that HTC would rather try to re-adapt its strategy to the current situation.
Its recent partnership with Google for the manufacture of the Pixel phones suggests that HTC might come back to its roots and become an Android OEM.
This means that the company might have a roadmap of its own, but help other companies build their products like it did with Google a few times in the past.
We'll most likely hear more about HTC's future plans regarding the smartphone business, but the first weeks of 2017 don't paint a nice picture for HTC fans.