HTC’s troubles continued throughout last month, with the company’s July revenue being its lowest monthly turnover in fifteen years, amounting to the equivalent of $45.7 million, more than 77-percent down annually. The poor performance disclosed on Monday marks a sequential drop of some 37-percent, thus further highlighting the already poor sales from June. The firm’s revenue for the first seven months of the year is hence sitting at below $555 million, being around 54-percent down year-on-year, with HTC’s chances of breaking the billion-dollar annual turnover mark now seemingly being extremely slim.
The poor commercial performance spanning a wide variety of product segments is still somewhat masked by the $1.1 billion cash injection from Google that HTC secured in early 2018, allowing a significant portion of its engineering talent to join the Taiwanese unit of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant, in addition to providing Alphabet’s subsidiary with non-exclusive rights to its vast patent portfolio. As a result of that move, HTC‘s first-half performance still yielded a bottom line that’s over $621 million in the black but with its second-quarter losses surpassing $222 million, those cash reserves are likely to erode in the immediate future.
The Taipei-based electronics manufacturer is also planning to reinvest the majority of the sum received from Google into emerging technologies such as virtual reality, 5G, and blockchain, its senior officials said earlier this year. The firm is now resorting to experimentation in hopes of finding a new niche that could drive growth for its struggling operations, with the next such bet coming in the form a blockchain Android smartphone called the Exodus which is set to launch in the coming weeks. Several months back, HTC completed a major cost-cutting effort that saw it consolidate its regional VR and mobile units, giving precedence to the former. The U12 Plus introduced in May is also believed to be the company’s only high-end Android handset of the year.