HTC plans to cut around a quarter of its global workforce, or 1,500 jobs, at its manufacturing unit in Taiwan; layoffs will be completed by the end of September
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Smartphone maker HTC plans to slash around a quarter of its global workforce through job cuts at its manufacturing unit …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third major retrenchment round in HTC's slide from premium handset maker: the company had already cut its Q2 revenue forecast in 2015 on weak China and premium-phone sales, then announced a 15% workforce reduction, roughly 2,250 jobs, later that year alongside a thinner phone lineup. In February 2018 it moved again, cutting U.S. staff as the smartphone and VR divisions were merged.
The new plan extends that consolidation to the home base: about 1,500 jobs, a quarter of the global workforce, go at the Taiwan manufacturing unit by end of September. Coming months after the division merger, it reads as capacity matching a smaller phone business rather than a one-off cost action.
First-order effects
- Roughly 1,500 manufacturing employees in Taiwan exit by the end of September, shrinking HTC's production footprint to match the reduced smartphone volumes implied by the earlier forecast cuts.
Second-order effects
- Taiwan-based component and assembly suppliers lose volume from one of the island's flagship consumer-electronics brands, compounding the pressure already visible in HTC's repeated revenue downgrades.
Third-order effects
- A pattern of successive cuts — 15% in 2015, U.S. layoffs in February, a quarter of the workforce now — points toward HTC structurally downsizing handsets and concentrating on the merged VR business, with manufacturing scaled to whichever line carries the future.
The trend: Struggling handset makers are responding to sustained share loss not with product relaunches but with successive deep workforce and manufacturing cuts, pivoting their remaining scale toward adjacent hardware categories like VR.