HTC has reportedly laid off up to 100 employees in the U.S.

The company's smartphone and VR teams are merging together.

2018's been a rough year so far for HTC. The company confirmed on February 14 that the president of its smartphone division had officially resigned, and just a little more than a week later, it's reported that a plethora of HTC employees in the U.S. have been let go.

A source familiar with HTC told this news to Digital Trends, and while it's still unclear how many employees were terminated, it's estimated to be anywhere from a few dozen up to "maybe 100" individuals.

The reason for all this? According to a representative from HTC, it's a result of the company merging its smartphone and VR divisions under one single umbrella.

We have recently brought our smartphone and VR businesses under common leadership in each region. Today, we announced a restructure in North America for the HTC smartphone business that will centralize the reporting structure within the region. In doing so, there have been some employee reductions to align the businesses and empower the teams to share more resources.

What does this mean for HTC's smartphone business going forward? Probably nothing good. We're hoping for big things with the U12 later in the year, but with ten quarters of consecutive losses (and counting) and 2,000 of its former hardware employees now working at Google, it's safe to say that HTC's seen better days.

HTC's smartphone president has resigned following ten quarters of losses