HTC has been struggling for a long time now to regain the marketshare it once enjoyed from the days of the EVO 4G. One of the original big Android manufacturers HTC has slowly spiraled downward in market share, initially blaming the sales drop back in 2011 on a portfolio of devices that was a mile long and quite frankly pretty confusing. Since then they’ve tried lowering the number of devices manufactured, with 2013 being the year that HTC produced the least number of devices; the same year as the original HTC One M7 that started the revolution in quality materials used on Android handsets.
Since then though the One series has stagnated and HTC’s innovation has been consistently looked over by a consumer market more eager for the Next Big Thing than what HTC has been delivering. Seeing as how component sales were just slashed by 30 percent it seems this trend of consumer malaise isn’t over for HTC. Furthering that trend HTC’s shares have plummeted to a new low reaching NT$92.80 (about $3 USD) after the close of market on Wednesday, a 5.79% drop from earlier in that day. Security analyst Andy Hsu at Ta Ching Securities stated that the stock has become technically fragile, meaning it could continue to drop at an unsustainable rate and cause further problems for the Taiwanese company.
HTC has been changing direction for a few months now and continues to work on changing up both their strategy and their portfolio to avert disaster. At last week’s annual general meeting HTC CEO Cher Wang apologized to investors for the low performance being experienced by the company’s stock and promised that the company will continue to improve through cutting costs, raising efficiency and working on new avenues of sales outside of the smartphone market. Seeing as how HTC is making the new VR headset for famous gaming developer Valve it seems that this new avenue could very well pay off for the company, but it may be too little too late at this point. HTC is working on new smartphones for release later this year but that hasn’t been enough to stop talks of possible buyouts from other companies, namely Chinese giant Xiaomi who would benefit from the additional materials accounts that HTC holds. While these buyouts have been denied there’s no denying that HTC is in trouble and seemingly needs a miracle to turn around at this point.