Winston Yung, an Americanized name if we ever heard one, is no longer HTC’s Chief Financial Officer. He’s been replaced by Chia-Lin Chang, who is not only a former Motorola engineer, but also a former Goldman Sachs partner. So why did HTC do this? These next few weeks are going to be absolutely vital for the company’s future. They have to prove to the world that the One X and One S are worth buying. They have to prove that people should still pay attention to HTC after Samsung announces the Galaxy S III in less than three weeks. They have to prove … a hell of a lot. According to Reuters, who quotes Tom Tang, a vice president at Masterlink Investment Advisory in Taipei, he says:
“When a company changes its CFO, it often indicates that the company’s operations or financials have reached a bottleneck.”
What the hell does that mean? What exactly reached a bottleneck? Did HTC want to grow and Winston couldn’t figure out the math to make that happen? The market isn’t all too happy about Winston’s departure. HTC’s stock is down over 5%. But enough about that, what do we think about the news? We’re frankly delighted. This bozo was responsible for HTC’s $300 million deal with Beats Audio. What exactly did the Taiwanese handset vendor get for that amount of money? A hideous red logo and a software equalizer that does absolutely nothing but ups the bass levels of your music.
So what should HTC do in 2012 to make sure they stop bleeding money? Besides fire a lot of people, preferably those people who work on Sense, there’s nothing that really else that comes to mind. HTC is in Nokia’s situation. They buy components from someone else, they use someone else’s software, they slap everything together, put it in a box, and then sell it to you.
Is that model sustainable?