Once upon a time, HTC was a big contender in the smartphone market. Popular for making high end, quality devices, HTC started out strong. Unfortunately for them, in the last quarterly reports, HTC posted a loss of $101 million. Fans of the company, as well as analysts, and even employees immediately started speculating on what the cause of the loss could be. Everyone just trying to find a way to give this story a happy ending. Now, one of those speculated reasons is getting some attention from HTC itself, as they review global public relations firms.
HTC has started to make big changes from within the company, as big as CEO Peter Chou, stepping back from the title. Well, the plan has been for Chou to back away from the title to give more responsibility to his partner and co-founder Cher Wang. Peter has not planned to leave the company, but rather just move into production and still have some CEO responsibilities. These changes aren’t the only things HTC is trying to do to turn things back around, they also enlisted some super star power.
The PR department of HTC is definitely one of the most exciting departments to work for, and not in a good way. Head of public relations Lorain Wang recently resigned from her position, stating that it was due to family situations. So after Lorain resigned and became nothing more than a consultant, in steps Ben Ho to add public relations to his laundry list of duties. Ho started out strong signing US actor, Robert Downey Jr. for a multimillion dollar advertising campaign. All of this change within the company and a little into advertising, is most likely pretty exciting for employees of the company, as well as everyone watching from the outside.
HTC has many eyes on them, well when people aren’t watching Samsung and Apple commercials on television, or listening to them on the radio, or even banner ads all over the web. Which is most likely what HTC aims to tackle, but they are looking at a global PR company to assist in this rebuild. The competition in advertising is very aggressive, and HTC’s VP of marketing in the USA Erin McGee, warned us all that they will be putting a lot more money into this aspect of the company, lets just hope they didn’t blow it all on Robert Downey Jr. As we wait to find out if HTC will regain their footing, we still have the HTC One to rave about, we just don’t want that to be their last big best selling flagship device.