MalaysianWireless have learned that the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Ninetology, Sean Ng has resigned early this month. At the moment, no official announcement were made regarding Sean’s departure.
According to our sources who are partners of Ninetology, Dato’ Eric Chuah Seong Ling, the Managing Director of CSL Manufacturing (M) Sdn Bhd is now in control of Ninetology.
We tried contacting the Ninetology team for a comment however they were unreachable. Ninetology has yet to make any official statement.
Our sources also indicate that apart from Sean, the two other key founders, Chief Operating Officer (COO) Marco Beh and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Shian have resigned. With the departure of its founders, the future of Ninetology is currently unknown.
Ninetology is currently being restructured. There are about 150-200 employees in the company. Some 100 people have been asked to leave the company while 60-70 people is believed to be absorbed into CSL. All company operation have been put on hold, including payments to suppliers and partners.
One of our sources said that the change of management is caused by the poor performance of the company this year. Ninetology is said to have performed very well last year(about 100,000 units a quarter) thanks to the RM200 smartphone rebate from SKMM. This year, there were rumours that it was only selling about 10,000 to 20,000 smartphones every quarter. As of March 2014, Ninetology said that it sold a total of over 1 million smartphones.
The mobile maker was supposed to launch two smartphones below RM500 in the third quarter this year, a Windows Phone 8 and a LTE Android smartphone. It likely that CSL might take over and launch these smartphones under the CSL brand. Previously CSL phones were launched under the Spice CSL brand but it went quiet over the past 1-2 year. We’ve learned that CSL Group and Spice CSL are no longer partners.
Ninetology was founded by Sean Ng, Marco Beh and Shian in April 2012. It announced RM180 million in revenue with 12% mobile device market share in Malaysia as of December 2013.
The company has operations in Indonesia with plans to launch in Vietnam, Philippines and Thailand. It has about 20 service centres and some 3500 touch points all around the country.
