Ah… HTC. This Taiwan-based smartphone OEM has been a frequent topic in the smartphone world this year. The company has unveiled a number of smartphones thus far, including a bunch of high-end ones like the One M9, One M9+, One E9, Butterfly 3, etc. HTC is also rumored to announce the ‘O2’ flagship before the end of this year, and it seems like the company is counting on that device to sell like crazy because their sales are really not going well. HTC has been having issues turning a profit for a couple of years now, and was once amongst the three biggest smartphone OEMs in the world.
That being said, we have some more bad news for the company, well, sort of. I don’t know if you recall, but it was reported last week that HTC plans to let go of 15% of its work force in order to cut costs. Well, HTC is close to selling of its Shanghai smartphone factory to an undisclosed Chinese OEM. This factory was built back in 2009, and it cost HTC $32.2 million. Selling of this factory will surely help HTC in the financial sense, at least a little bit, we all know they could use some income. It will certainly going to be interesting to see what will HTC’s next move be, but the company really has to figure out how to start selling more devices because at this rate, they’ll have to sell the whole company.
As already mentioned, HTC has released a number of devices this year, but none of them were as successful as HTC have hoped. The Snapdragon 810 controversy definitely hurt One M9’s sales, not to mention that the device looks far too similar to its predecessor. Other HTC-branded high-end offerings are available only in specific regions, which is certainly not good for sales, and some of HTC’s low and mid-range devices seemingly can’t compete with some higher-end devices which are far more affordable (mainly Chinese devices). It would be a shame if HTC gets bought by a third-party company, but keep in mind that they might not be able to avoid it.