HTC Corp (宏達電) yesterday appointed former Orange SA executive vice president Yves Maitre as its new chief executive officer, while Cher Wang (王雪紅) is to remain the company’s chairwoman.
Maitre was formerly head of the leading French telecom’s consumer equipment and partnerships business. His appointment took effect immediately, HTC said.
“We have recently created a lot of new and meaningful content for consumers ... [including] our Viveport platform and 5G blinkbox,” Wang told a news conference in Taipei. “We now need a very strong leader to help expand HTC for the next era.”
Photo: CNA
Wang took over as the company’s chief executive four years ago, with the hope of reinventing HTC as a complete ecosystem company and to lay the foundations for the company’s future development in virtual reality (VR), extended reality and 5G technology.
Now is the perfect time to hand over the stewardship of HTC to Maitre, who understands HTC’s VR vision and has insight into the 5G domain in which the company is aggressively asserting itself, Wang said.
Maitre said he believes that the transition from 4G to 5G would lead to big changes in business-to-consumer relationships, and that the company’s VR business would enjoy more success thanks to 5G’s low latency.
“HTC is a part of [the change], it was obvious that I will have to join HTC,” Maitre said.
HTC has decided to focus on providing hardware and enterprise services, he said, adding that the company is building a new business strategy.
While declining to give an exact time frame on the company turning a profit after it suffered losses over the past five quarters, Maitre said he is committed to the company’s shareholders and board, and is confident that it would become a “winning” company.
HTC on Sept. 6 posted NT$730 million (US$23.52 million) of consolidated sales for last month, up 66.8 percent from July, but down 47 percent from a year earlier.
In the first eight months of the year, cumulative sales fell 62 percent year-on-year to NT$6.93 billion.
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