HTC CEO Yves Maitre resigns after less than a year

Earlier today, HTC announced that its President and CEO Yves Maitre has resigned due to personal reasons, making his stint at the company just a few days shy of a full year. Chairwoman and co-founder Cher Wang has once again assumed the CEO position.

According to HTC’s statement, “the strict international travel restrictions due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic... have had an impact on” the French executive, who had spent most of the past eleven months away from his family back in Europe. The board has therefore accepted Maitre’s resignation.

During Maitre’s time at HTC, the company attempted to boost its VR presence by expanding its Vive Cosmos family of modular headsets, and it even teased its next-gen devices which are said to be more compact. This was followed by the launch of Vive XR Suite to focus its VR efforts on the business sector. The company also eventually released its first 5G smartphone, the U20.

Still, the former Orange executive was unable to turn the company around. Q2 2020 saw HTC’s ninth consecutive quarterly loss, which cost NT$1.83 billion (about US$62 million); and it was also a jump from the previous quarter’s NT$1.68 billion loss (US$57 million).

After a round of layoffs back in December, the company announced further action in June, neither of which specified the number of employees affected. Though according to a source close to the matter, the latest round of redundancies wasn’t even Maitre’s own doing, which suggests he had already submitted his resignation months ago — a typical procedure for high-level executives.

Now that Wang is back in charge, not only will she have to take care of financial matters, but she will also have to put up a good fight against Facebook’s rumored next-gen standalone VR headset very soon. At the same time, Wang also needs to ensure that her smartphone business — what little is left of it — is sustainable.