HTC has had a rough time over the past few years and their recent sales figures from a study are showing how it is affecting their bottom line. BayStreet Research shows that just during the month of July 2016 in the US, that HTC sales have dropped 25-percent over the same period last year – one of the reasons that T-Mobile has already removed the HTC 10 from their website after only starting to sell the device during May. Moves like this make it harder for HTC to continue to sell their smartphones.
HTC struggled early on with product design and marketing and the Nexus 9 tablet HTC built for Google did nothing to help HTC recapture their earlier sales success. However, the HTC 10 is the best smartphone that HTC has ever made – it has a new all-metal design, a QHD display, the Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor, the Adreno 530 to handle heavy graphics, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, expandable memory, a terrific camera, and damn good looks. However, the report from BayStreet stills shows them struggling and hopefully they will be able to avoid laying off workers like they did last year.
HTC reported global revenues for July of about $200 million – this is a 0.6-percent decline from the previous month and almost 15-percent decline from July 2015. So far the Taiwan company is down by 51-percent year-over-year and the year is only a little over one-half over. BayStreet predicts that revenues will continue to decline in the third quarter in the US with year-over-year numbers of only 900,000 smartphones shipped – about a 44-percent decrease. It is hard to sell devices when not all of the carriers even market them – Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint launched the HTC 10, but AT&T was conspicuously absent from the group. Without the backing of carriers pushing your device, it will make a difference in sales revenue. HTC did not even rank in the top five smartphone vendors worldwide at the end of 2015, but BayStreet Research does offer a ray of hope this year with the replacement for the HTC Desire 626 – the HTC’s new Desire 530. This type of smartphone is sold mainly as prepaid devices throughout the US, and they feel it “should help regain share in 2HQ3.”