AST Announces Resignations of Two Senior Vice Presidents

The management shuffle continued Friday at struggling AST Research Inc., as the computer maker said that two of its top sales executives have resigned and that one has been replaced by a consultant from Samsung Electronics, AST’s largest shareholder.

The latest to leave the Irvine-based company were Michael Willcocks, 47, who was senior vice president, Asia Pacific, and Gerald T. Devlin, 50, senior vice president, Americas.

This marks the second time in less than three years that Devlin has left the company. He resigned in June 1994, but was brought back a little over a year later in the same post by then-Chief Executive Safi U. Qureshey as part of a management shake-up. Qureshey himself moved out of day-to-day management last year.

No replacement was named.

Willcocks was replaced by Hoon Choo, 50, who has recently served as a member of a team of Samsung consultants streamlining operations at AST’s manufacturing plant in Ft. Worth, Texas. Samsung, based in South Korea, owns 46% of AST after coming to the company’s financial rescue last year.

AST also said that it has created a new position of senior vice president for global corporate marketing and communications, and that it has begun a search to fill that position.

The changes are part of an effort “to streamline the decision-making process,” said Young-Soo Kim, who engineered Samsung’s investment in AST and became the Irvine computer maker’s chief executive in August after former CEO Ian Diery was ousted after less than a year on the job.