HTC, Asia's second largest smartphone maker, has witnessed a sharp decline in terms of net profit figures in the third quarter. The Taiwan-based company has announced that its third-quarter net profit fell 79 percent, missing forecasts.
According to the company, its flagship One series phones could not meet expectations and failed to catch up with Apple Inc.'s iPhone and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s Galaxy smartphone range.
While the company has made a modest quarterly profit - net profit of $133.2 million on total revenues of $2.4 billion - it is still a massive decline from last year's $636.5 million net profit on $4.64 billion revenue.
HTC's fall was quite surprising to all business pundits, since as recently as in 2010, the company was the biggest smartphone maker, using Google Inc.'s Android operating system. Since then, however, the company started witnessing a historic and uncontrollable fall. Its profits started declining continuously from the last quarter of 2011, and latest reports show that the company's profits are still heading south.
The reasons for the continuous fall of the company's profitability can be arguably viewed as its failure to offer innovative devices to the market, lack of proper marketing of released and upcoming devices, and of course, incessantly increasing competition from other Android-based smartphone makers including Samsung. In 2011, South Korean electronics giant Samsung overtook HTC to become the biggest vendor of Android devices in the U.S.
The company has recently unveiled a new Windows Phone 8X along with a new flagship One X+ - both with a set of impressive features that are already being talked about. Can these phones reverse the slumping fortunes of HTC and translate the company's brand equity into profitability? Let's hope they do.
- Contribute to this Story:
- Send us a tip
- Send us a photo or video
- Suggest a correction
