Chailin Chang, HTC’s Chief Financial Officer, has just been put in charge of the Taiwanese handset maker’s global sales. This doesn’t mean he’s giving up the CFO role, however, it means he’s going to be putting in some 80 hour work weeks. Jason Mackenzie, the company’s previous Head of Global Sales, tweeted that he’s still working at HTC as the President of HTC USA.
So why the game of musical chairs? Chang is HTC’s accountant. He knows how much money the company is taking in and how much money the company is bleeding week after week, month after month, quarter after quarter. Now that he’s also the Head of Global Sales, he can decide where the company should invest their resources, where they should pull out, and how to plan for the future. At least that’s my theory. Can HTC become a healthy company again? Absolutely, but it’s not going to be easy. The first thing that needs to change is how HTC tackles software development. Whether you like Sense or not isn’t the question here, the question is does it make financial sense to keep an army of developers on the payroll when Android has become essentially “good enough” that you don’t need to differentiate anymore on the UI layer. What does HTC have planned for 2014? So far we only know about one device, codename M8. It’s the successor to the One, and early leaks suggest it’ll have a 5.0 inch 1080p screen and a Snapdragon 800. Not bleeding edge, but then again HTC has never been about bleeding edge.
