Help This Company?


Help This Company?
HTC was the first manufacturer to launch a smartphone with Android system in September 2008 and had a long history of cooperating with Google, including the production of the first Nexus (2010) and first Google Pixel (2016) device. Although it was once the direct competitor of Apple, Nokia and Samsung back in 2011 (15% of market share worldwide as of 2011), HTC has been experiencing enormous ups and downs in the smartphone market.




HTC does not own any hardware technologies of a phone (e.g. CPU, ROM, RAM, display etc). On the other hand, competitors have lots of advantages in this. Samsung has its own production line of AMOLED displays, RAM, SoC (System on a chip) and camera sensors. Huawei and Xiaomi produce their own SoC. Sony monopolizes the camera sensor market etc. Without any specific technologies and having a lack of innovation in recent years, HTC solely depends on purchasing hardware from other manufacturers to make their phones, which results in heavy criticisms of overpricing their products, and a continuous drop in revenue and market share (and stock price as well).






Being over-concentrated in the smartphone sector also accelerated the decline of HTC. Samsung, LG, Huawei, Apple and Xiaomi all have side businesses aside from manufacturing phones, which helps diversify the business risk. In view of this, HTC stepped into the VR sector in 2015 and released its premium VR device - HTC Vive. The company earned high reputation (thanks to the top-notch build quality and excellent user experience) yet little profit (due to the same old overpricing problem). Currently, HTC comes third in the VR market share, losing to Samsung and Sony by a hair. Will this be the future way out of HTC?







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