Taiwan-based HTC Corporation has confirmed that it has laid off several employees from its US offices and will merge its virtual reality (VR) and smartphone departments, media reports said.
HTC said the company will undergo some reorganisation, merging its smartphone and VR businesses to reduce operation cost, The Verge reported on Friday.
“We have recently brought our smartphone and VR businesses under common leadership in each region. Today, we announced a restructure in North America for the HTC smartphone business that will centralise the reporting structure within the region,” HTC said in an emailed response to Verge.
“In doing so, there have been some employee reductions to align the businesses and empower the teams to share more resources,” it added.
While it is not known how many people HTC has laid off, according to a report in Digitaltrends.com, the number stands somewhere between a few dozen to maybe 100 people.
The company has been operating at a net income loss for the first three quarters of last year, losing around $70 million to $100 million every quarter, the report added.
The job cuts followed HTC’s president of smartphone and connected devices Chialin Chang’s resignation last week.
However, Google is acquiring a large part of HTC’s smartphone division in a deal valued at $1.1 billion. The deal involves more than 2,000 HTC engineers moving over to Google. They will all remain in Taiwan. This inflow of cash could help the company keep moving ahead.
HTC has also been aggressive in its phone launches. Its most recent flagship, the 6-inch HTC U11 Plus has been receiving positive reviews for the innovation that went into the phone, its powerful performance, the design, its 12 megapixel rear camera, storage with 6GB RAM and 128GB internal memory and battery life. Several reviews also praise the loud, clear and clean speaker output in the smartphone.
(With IANS inputs)
[“Source-thenewsminute”]
