When giant phone manufacturers are launching new models and new features to attract customers, how could one of the most renowned name in the field of mobile phone manufacturing – HTC be left far behind? HTC left a teaser with its audience as it revealed its plans for launching new competitive models early next year, and give its contemporaries manufacturing smartphones and the likes, a hard time.
It should be noted that HTC has performed the worst in the global smarthphones market this year and has lagged behind by 30 percent in the recent last eight sessions. This has lead to concern of various investors who feel that HTC may have lost its innovative touch, something which made HTC one of the most preferred brand when it came to smartphones.
The worries of the investors were further intensified when HTC predicted a shocking forecast of no revenue for the fourth quarter. It was hard to see the brand enjoying double digits growth, once upon a time with its Desire, Sensation and Wildfire models, settling down for zero revenue.
Although the company maintains it will not give the market mongers another Nokia like story, the Finnish company who lost its market dominance in a blink of an eye.
“I don’t think it’s so serious,” Chief Financial Officer Winston Yung told Reuters on Monday. “We have six quarters of improvement, the most conservative guidance is 45 million units of shipments this year, a lot higher than 25 million last year,” he said.
“We will focus on the product next year, better and more competitive. Other than new LTE phones for the U.S. market, we also have phones for the global market. We will launch some worldwide flagship products. We’re confident in them.”
On Monday, HTC shares opened with a downfall of 1.3 percent and though it managed to resuscitate the shares up to 1 percent they again had a huge fall down to 5 percent. At 0251 GMT, they were down 2.35 percent at T$478.
Besides this is nothing when compared to their reach of T$1,238.1 in April, something that made the founder, Mr. Cher Wang emerge at top of the Forbes rich list for Taiwan this year.
“More foreign investors are still selling HTC as the company doesn’t have many bets in hand,” said Masterlink Investment Advisory vice president Tom Tang. “And unlike last time (when shares plunged), HTC didn’t make a share buyback plan this time,” he said.
The trouble for HTC doesn’t only comes in the form of stiff competition against Apple Inc’s iPhones and Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy line-up, but HTC is also haunted by the legal matters over patents from Apple and others.
German patent firm IPCom informed on Friday that they are strongly planning on to ceasing the sales of all HTC smartphones in Germany, as quickly as possible, to halt as quickly as possible, right after HTC gave up its appeal against the patent ruling.
The Taiwan based firm then issues a statement explaining they pulled out the appeal because the German Federal Patent court had already professed the concerned patent claim to be invalid.
They also added that the technology in question was redundant and HTC no longer used it in their operations, thus any action on the part of IPCom will have no effect on its sales.
