HTC’s consolidated revenues for August 2017 hit a 13-year low, with the company reporting that the aggregate of all of its revenues last month amounted to $3 billion New Taiwan dollars, or approximately $99.69 million. Compared to the company’s financial report for July, its August performance dropped by 51.5 percent, worrying investors. A similar drop is observable when comparing HTC’s latest financial report with that for August 2016, with the Taoyuan, Taiwan-based original equipment manufacturer (OEM) experiencing a 54.4 percent year-on-year decline.
In a short statement issued on Wednesday, the company stated that its monthly performance isn’t entirely representative of the current quarterly trends, adding that its smartphone shipments in the third quarter of the year are still on track to hit its previously set targets, without clarifying on the matter. According to previous reports, HTC was commissioned to manufacture the Pixel 2 smartphone from Google, with this particular deal being an extension of the hardware partnership the two entered in 2016 when the Taiwanese tech giant produced both the Pixel and Pixel XL flagships. HTC’s latest struggles are understood to be partially related to the weakening demand for the U11, its latest high-end Android offering which peaked in July and has been rapidly losing momentum ever since. The firm’s annual sales are currently 14.4 percent down year-on-year compared to the first eight months of 2016, amounting to approximately $1.33 billion.
The company’s struggles recently led it to start considering liquidating some of its assets, industry insiders said earlier this summer, with latest reports indicating that Google and HTC have entered the final negotiation phase on the potential sale of the firm’s smartphone business to the Mountain View, California-based Internet giant. Apart from a direct acquisition of HTC’s handset division, the Alphabet-owned company is also said to be considering becoming the firm’s strategic partner in an effort to boost its performance and consequently share a cut of any potential profits from their hypothetical joint operations. For the time being, HTC still isn’t seeking to sell the entirety of its business or its most promising Vive VR unit, insiders said. Google already has some experience running an acquired smartphone business, having owned Motorola Mobility from 2011 to 2014 when it sold the U.S. OEM to Lenovo.