Taiwanese technology brand ASUS has announced the exit of its long-standing CEO Jerry Shen. Shen has been the CEO of ASUS since January 2008 and will step down as the company CEO at the end of this month.
Post exit from ASUS, Shen will join a new AIoT startup called iFast as the Chairman and CEO. ASUS, whom he worked with for over a decade, will have a stake of 30% in this startup.
Shen’s resignation comes ahead of ASUS’ “corporate transformation” which will also result in the CEO position being co-chaired by S.Y. Hsu and Samson Hu. Both of them will assume the role of co-CEO on January 1, 2019. Hsu is currently the PC business lead at ASUS, whereas Hu is the global lead of ASUS’ customer service.
During his tenure at ASUS, Shen oversaw the launch of products like the PadFone series and the Transformer series. He’s also the creator of Eee PC which is one of his biggest achievements at ASUS.
Having said that, ASUS has also announced that its mobile division has now shifted its focus on gamers and power users, which means we can now expect ASUS to launch more smartphones like the ROG Phone and ZenFone 5Z – the former is a gaming smartphone with the latter being a mainstream flagship. The company also revealed a one-time loss of NT$6 billion (around $190 Million) to cover the “loss of inventory, royalties, production costs and organizational adjustment expenses.”
ASUS recently launched the ZenFone Max (M2) and the ZenFone Max Pro (M2). But, now that ASUS’ mobile division has shifted its focus on gamers and power users, we may not see that many budget and mid-range smartphones from the company.
We are eager to see what kind of products ASUS launches next year.
