Last week HTC lost its VP of Design to Google. This week, the company’s Global Executive Vice President has also departed.
Jason Mackenzie yesterday announced that he is leaving the company after nearly 12 years. The executive did not give a reason for his departure, nor does he know where he’s heading next, as one tweet reveals. We’ve reached out to HTC to ask why he left the role and who the company plans to replace him with.
After 12 amazing years, today is my last day @htc. It was a great run & I feel blessed. Thank you Peter Chou, @cherwang, & TeamHTC.
— Jason Mackenzie (@JasonBMac24) January 31, 2017
Mackenzie came on board at HTC in 2005, having preciously worked as Vice President of T-Mobile USA. He’s held various roles at the company over the years, moving from President of the Americas to Global Executive Vice President in January of 2016. Over the past few years Mackenzie has worked on HTC’s VR headset, the Vive, helping to bring it to market in April of last year. Much of his time, however, was spent on the company’s smartphone business, which has been struggling of late.
It a statement on LinkedIn Mackenzie thanked Peter Chou and Cher Wang, the former and current company CEOs respectively, for his time working with them. “To say that I enjoyed my time at HTC is a massive understatement,” he said. “HTC was family and I loved the challenges and opportunity to work on so many cool products and partner (and learn from) so many great customers.”
The news follows the reveal that Claude Zellweger, HTC’s VP of Design, was moving to the Google Daydream team. Both loses are a blow to HTC, but it’s still pushing on; 2017 will see the company release a new Tracker peripheral for the Vive along with an upgraded headstrap with integrated audio.
