HTC Corp (宏達電) announced yesterday that it is to cut 15 percent of its global employee base as the company seeks profitable growth with a more agile operating model.
The company has 15,685 employees worldwide, according to its annual financial report, therefore the planned job cuts suggest that the Taiwanese smartphone maker is to layoff more than 2,300 staff, the largest lay off in the company’s history.
REDUCTIONS
Apart from reducing the number of employees worldwide, HTC also plans to streamline its operations through a 35 percent reduction in operating expenditure, the company said in a statement, without giving further details.
The company’s business realignment includes establishing new business units — premium smartphones, virtual reality (VR) and Internet-connected lifestyle products — in a bid to create greater focus in its key areas, the statement said.
DIVERSIFYING
“As we diversify beyond smartphones, we need a flexible and dynamic organization to ensure we can take advantage of all of the exciting opportunities in the connected lifestyle space,” HTC chairwoman and chief executive officer Cher Wang (王雪紅) said in the statement.
“This strategic realignment of our business will ensure that each product group has the right focus, the right resources and the right expertise to win new markets,” Wang said.
SUSPENDED
In a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday, HTC confirmed that it has suspended the sale of a larger model of its flagship HTC One M9 in the Netherlands due to issues with its 4G LTE connectivity.
HTC shares plunged 7.82 percent to NT$50.7 in Taipei trading yesterday and have plummeted 21.43 percent in the past week, after the company announced last week that it could have from NT$5.51 to NT$5.85 in net losses per share this quarter.
The company posted a loss per share of NT$9.7 last quarter.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts