ASUS split the CEO job and narrowed phones toward gamers

By late 2018 ASUS had a smartphone problem. Revenue had fallen 10% year on year in the third quarter, the phone market was brutal, and analysts expected the company to fall into the red in the fourth quarter.

The board let longtime CEO Jerry Shen step down and replaced the single CEO role with two insiders from January 2019: S.Y. Hsu, head of the PC business, and Samson Hu, leader of global customer service. ASUS paired the handover with a major phone-strategy reset.

The decision narrowed mobile toward gamers and power users instead of fighting the whole smartphone market. The painful one-time charge made the retreat visible, while the dual-CEO structure matched product innovation with customer operations.

ASUS absorbed a roughly NT$6.2B mobile reset and gave product, service and AIoT leaders a shared mandate.

ASUS chose insiders who already understood PCs, service and operations rather than a generalist turnaround hire.

The company wrote off mobile inventory and restructuring costs so the new leaders could judge the reset cleanly.

Focusing on ROG-style gamers and power users gave mobile a defensible niche instead of another mass-market fight.

When a side business bleeds attention, leadership design can make the strategic retreat explicit and free the core team to specialize.

The handover did not make ASUS a phone volume winner. It made the company's priorities clearer: PCs, gaming hardware, service, AI and focused mobile niches. That was a more realistic architecture for a Taiwanese brand facing larger Chinese and Korean phone rivals.