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Vertu's sudden CEO swap spells trouble after Chinese buyout
It's only been three months since we met Vertu's then freshly-appointed CEO Billy Crotty, an Irishman who was brought in by the company's new Chinese owner, but for reasons unknown, it appears that he's already left the luxury phone maker. That's according to the LinkedIn page of Gordon Watson, who has since been promoted from VP of Sales and Marketing to CEO. Needless to say, it's an unusually short stint for such an important role, though there were already signs of trouble beforehand with the recent departures of other key execs.
Chinese-owned Vertu vows to keep making luxury phones in the UK
It's been a little over a week since Vertu announced that it is now under full ownership of Hong Kong's Godin Holdings. Which, as we found out, is linked to Godin Cyberspace Security Technology -- aka GodinSec from mainland China. This raised two questions: Will Vertu be ditching its "Handmade in England" slogan in favor of the classic "Made in China?" And does Godin intend to make use of its own secure smartphone OS on future Vertu devices? The short answer to both is no, according to the newly appointed CEO Billy Crotty.
Vertu's mysterious Chinese buyer has its own secure smartphone OS
In recent years, we've watched Vertu evolve to a luxury phone maker that actually cares about specs, and you can thank CEO Massimiliano "Max" Pogliani for that. But according to Financial Times, Swedish private equity group EQT has recently sold Vertu to Hong Kong's Godin Holdings, and Pogliani has since decided "to pass on the baton" to someone else. While these changes may bring a tear to some eyes out there, things are about to get real interesting for Vertu. You see, after some digging around in the Hong Kong Companies Registry, we found out that this Godin Holdings is actually just a four-month-old shell company of Godin Cyberspace Security Technology (translated name), which claims to be working on its very own secure smartphone OS dubbed "GOS." If you put the pieces together, we could be looking at a luxury equivalent of the Blackphone or the BlackBerry Priv in the making.
