AST’s Wai Szeto, a Key Player in Firm’s Early Days, to Retire

An executive who played a key role at AST Research Inc. during its early days is leaving the Irvine-based PC maker, the company said Monday.

Wai Szeto, vice president for corporate development, will retire Feb. 28. Szeto, 48, said he is leaving to spend more time with his family.

Szeto’s departure marks another step in the growing influence of AST’s newest generation of managers, led by president Jim Schraith, who was senior vice president for sales and service operations before his promotion last July.

Szeto, one of AST’s longest tenured executives, was hired as a consultant in 1984, four years after AST was founded, to help set up its operations in the Far East.

The divisions Szeto helped open in Hong Kong and in Taiwan became the basis of AST’s strong position in the Far East, which now also includes manufacturing in China, said AST Chief Executive Safi Qureshey.

“Wai has been very instrumental in helping establish AST as a brand name,” Qureshey said in a statement Monday.

Szeto said that as AST grew to become the nation’s sixth-largest personal computer manufacturer, the increasing specialization of tasks meant that the company moved away from the entrepreneurial talents of its three founders.

“When you get bigger you can’t have everybody doing everything . . . which is what it used to be like,” Szeto said.

An engineer by training, Szeto said he hopes to spend more time with his three teen-age children at home in Irvine. He also expects either to invest or to become involved in another technology-oriented business, perhaps one working on wireless communication technologies, he said.

Albert Wong, who founded the company with Qureshey and with Tom Yuen, and who worked closely with Szeto, described him as a trouble-shooter who helped build the company’s manufacturing operations.

“I think the company’s to the point where people who have been in the company a long time, the old horses, are not the key to AST’s identity,” said Wong, who left AST after a falling-out with the company’s other two founders in 1988 but who stays in contact with them and other executives at AST.

Szeto “was a very good liaison to a lot of different parts of the company; he could bounce around to a lot of different departments and things would be planned,” Wong said.

Szeto’s most recent role was an interim one, overseeing AST’s Far East operations before the appointment of Bob McFarland as vice president for the region. Szeto’s responsibilities will be taken over by managers in AST’s notebook, desktop and server business units, as well as by the regional vice presidents in each of AST’s three operating regions, the company said.