HTC will be letting go of 1500 employees from its Taiwanese manufacturing division. It’s a move that has been widely described as a cost-cutting exercise by the smartphone and VR headset maker, as the company struggles to recover from months of poor financial performance.
The layoffs comprise 22% of HTC’s entire workforce, and is expected to be completed by the end of September 2018. HTC hopes that by doing this, the company would be able to turn a profit as it said it would by this year. It also hopes that the sales of its new U12+ flagship will increase its overall profits and turn its luck around.
It’s important to note that the 1500 affected staff are not from team that went over to Google to work on the latter’s Pixel smartphones, as part of the US$1.1 billion (~RM4.05 billion) deal that the two companies agreed to last year.
June 26: @htc says it will return to profitability this year
July 2: @htc says it will cut its Taiwan workforce by 1,500 people (about 22% of total employees)— Samson Ellis (@samsonellis) July 2, 2018
It should be pointed out that this layoff isn’t the most recent either. Back in February, HTC had also laid off a large number of staff from its US office, and only left personnel to handle its global side of operations. This also saw its VR and smartphone divisions being combined into a single division.
Prior to that, HTC’s then president of smartphone and connected devices, Chailin Chang, tendered in his resignation with immediate effect after the deal between HTC and Google was concluded.
