HTC Losing Top Workforce Members

By: Zain Nabi  |   May 24th, 2013   |   News, Smartphones

A number of top officials at key management positions at HTC have left the company during the last few months, apparently foreseeing the company’s downfall in the days to come. HTC has been suffering of late due to low revenue generation and delay in launch of its flagship phone HTC First that has Facebook’s Home incorporated in it even though it did not perform as per expectations in the U.S. soon after its launch.

 

According to a report by Guardian, the people who have left HTC recently include Rebecca Rowland, global retail marketing manager; Phil Roberson, UK and Ireland regional director, Mike Coombes, UK and Ireland head of sales; Florian Seiche, chief of Europe, Middle East and Africa; and John Starkweather, manager and worldwide director of digital marketing. Some other key figures who are not with the company now are chief product officer Kouji Koudera; Asian chief executive Lennard Hoornik; and director of global communications Jason Gordon.

 

HTC First was pulled off the U.S. markets following disappointing sales in the country. It existed for only one month there. HTC One, however, received quite strong reviews from the critics and many consumers used it against Samsung Galaxy S4. But HTC was not even able to come closer to Samsung in terms of shipping its smartphones. Samsung recently announced that it had shipped 10 million units of the S4 a month after its formal launch, and HTC’s shipment are not even close to these figures.

 

All these factors combined have contributed to departure of the company’s key people, but some reports have claimed that some of the officials who have left the company did not agree to the vision of the higher management and thought it prudent to part ways.

 

Meanwhile, Facebook has also said that it is trying to make improvements in Home under the light of feedback from users and that it might limit support to the new devices. Facebook said in a statement, via Guardian:

 

“We’ve listened to feedback from users on their experience using Home. While many people love it, we’ve heard a lot of great feedback about how to make Home substantially better. As a result we’re focusing the next few months on adding customisation features that address the feedback we received. While we focus on making Home better, we are going to limit supporting new devices and think it makes a lot of sense for EE and Orange to hold off deploying the HTC First in Europe.”