I don’t think anyone can deny HTC is not exactly in a great place right now, and it hasn’t been for a while, but I believe the HTC One lit a spark inside the company and the company is now motivated to work hard to recover, while continuing to make ever better quality and innovative products.
In an internal e-mail obtained by WSJ, HTC’s CEO, Peter Chou, appointed Jason McKenzie (former President of Global Sales) as the new HTC America boss, while he’ll be supporting Peter Chou with the global strategy. Jason McKenzie led HTC America until a year ago, when he was promoted to global sales, but it seems HTC needs him back in US to regain the lost market share. Both Samsung and Apple have kept stealing market share from HTC in US, and now Motorola is about to make a big push in US, too, so HTC needs its best man on the job.
The current (up until now) President of North America, Mike Woodward, “will lead Emerging Devices, a newly established business unit that will focus on innovative new HTC products and global distribution strategies.” This is good news, because HTC has never seemed too focused on the low-end market, where real market share can be gained globally, and it showed. Their low-end products were more like mid-range, and they also weren’t priced nor pushed that aggressively against the competition. So HTC has never done that well in the low-end and emerging markets.
Besides revenue and profits, HTC is also in desperate need of more market share. Market share is important because it means your phones are in as many hands as possible, which also tends to automatically help the company’s branding, too, because more people know and use HTC’s phones, and then can promote them to their friends, too. Of course that also implies good quality, but I don’t think HTC will have a problem with that. I’d say their biggest problem at that level is having competitive prices. If HTC can make under $100 smartphones with Cortex A7 and a decent GPU, they could push the phones into the emerging markets pretty easily.
HTC is starting to do the right things, and hopefully it won’t run out of money before they get to accomplish those things, because it’s a company that makes some of the best Android products around.
[Via Techcrunch]