Ever since the HTC 10 was launched earlier this year, conflicting reports have emerged about its sales. While some reports have claimed that the device hasn’t really sold as well as HTC would have liked, others have claimed that it has been doing brisk business in some part of the world or another. The latest report regarding the sales of HTC’s 2016 flagship comes from Japan, where the device was launched in association with local telecom operator KDDI. According to a claim made by a senior HTC executive, the device is apparently the second most popular premium Android smartphone in the country currently after Sony’s new offering. That’s according to the president of HTC North Asia, Mr. Jack Tong, who revealed this information to the Taiwanese media earlier on Thursday. While HTC’s smartphone business has been in the red for several quarters now, the relative success of the HTC 10 in the country must be a huge shot in the arm for the Taiwanese tech firm.
Of course, as alluded to earlier, it hasn’t been smooth sailing for HTC with its latest flagship smartphone. Reports out of China within days of the phone’s release claimed that only 251 units of the device were pre-ordered in the first eleven days after being listed on local e-commerce outlets, TMall and Jingdong Mall. Other reports have also indicated that HTC is apparently only looking to manufacture only about a million units of the device this year, which would be significantly lower than what competitors like Samsung or Apple would expect from their flagship devices. Either way, now that the device is seeing some momentum in the Land of the Rising Sun, HTC believes that it can leverage the brand image the company enjoys in the country, to promote its products in other markets in the region.
With HTC managing to shift close to 100,000 units of its Vive virtual reality headset already, the company’s overall revenues in Q2, 2016 came in at NT$18.86 billion (US$582.17 million), which represents a 27% sequential growth over its revenues in the previous quarter. Sadly for the company’s shareholders, though, the immediate outlook for the company continues to remain grim, and in spite of increasing revenues, analysts expect the company to remain in the red in the foreseeable future.