By 
HTC is providing an early warning of what could turn out to be another bad quarter for the flailing mobile manufacturer. After stringing together a series of successively disappointing quarters before reaching their lowest point ever in Q4 of 2012, the Taiwanese company is informing investors to expect revenues at best to remain flat. At worst, HTC says to expect a 17 percent downturn.
HTC is banking on turning around their poor fortunes in 2013 after inking a licensing agreement with Apple and reevaluating their approach to product development and marketing. The burden rests on the likes of the company’s upcoming M7 flagship, but it will take more than a great device to spark new revenues. It starts there, of course, but HTC offered a varied selection of quality handsets last year to little or no gain.
We’ll know more about HTC’s current financial situation when they release their full report. We’re expecting to learn more about the M7 at a February 19th press event.
[via BGR]
How can you loose money making smartphones? You got idiot buyers who think they are buying smartphones for “free” and paying $2000 over 2 years for service and carriers subsidizing about $350-$450 per phone. No smartphone costs $250 (most cost much less than $200) to make (parts, labor, shipping, etc). Yeah there is R&D but if you sell anything over a million, it barely adds to the cost. While the most you pay is $200 up front. I understand not being able to compete in the tablet market, but in the smartphone market competing should be easy. On to the point, you “technically” pay $600 for a smartphone that costs about $200 to make = $400 profit. Honestly I am waiting for one of the OEMs to exploit this market injustice and make a super high end smartphone and make it free on contract on every network (hey free = $400-$450, so they would only have to sell 2X to make the same amount of profit).
Shipping, labor, manufacturing fees, R&D, investors, electricity, heating, water, all cost money as well you know.
Oh my god you are so smart, you could probably start making your own smartphones /S
So, the “let’s flood the market with a million handsets so we have to spread our advertising dollars super thin and can’t establish a brand identity” strategy still isn’t working?
Huh. They don’t say.
HTC was once a good device manufacturer, now not so much. Sorry but i see HTC going the way of Rim
I predict a Google intervention at some point. Nexus 5 perhaps?
I agree, I don’t see htc making it to the end of the year on their own. I can see some sort of merger or acquisition happening very soon, maybe google should buy them out.
Google won’t buy them out due too,, due to HTC signing their life away to apple over licensing agreements
Nope! LG is on board for Nexus 5 already.
Their mistake was shortly after the OG Evo 4G. They released too many phones & couldn’t keep up with the updates on all the handsets. Before then HTC was *known* as the Manufacturer who was the best with getting new Android updates to their phones. Now, not so much. Their hardware is still amazing & the build quality is still the best IMHO
They should have stuck to one big Flagship device a year like Apple & Samsung did. Then again, Motorola released a lot of handsets like HTC has done and they are doing fine still. Where did HTC go wrong? =
Doing fine? they were sold to Google.
Sounds like a pretty good outcome to me lol…
Just include a microSD and removable battery and people will buy your phones. Not everyone wants to have their personal data up in the cloud. Is that so hard to understand?
M7, another HTC device that I and many other people will pass up.
That AND stop putting all the phones on lock-down. They make (maybe they’ve changed this with the One series) it difficult to root phones by removing root on reboots until devs find a way to make it stick. Had that problem with the MyTouch 4G and the Amaze 4G.
They didn’t release some of the source code for the Amaze until almost one year after release, which made developing AOSP extremely difficult.
Let us unlock our phones and do what we want with them. I ditched the Amaze and went with the Nexus 4, which is the first time I’ve not had an HTC phone. I won’t be going back unless they change their stance.
The lock-down thing is related to the carrier. HTC doesn’t have enough power to tell a carrier they don’t want to lock down their phones.
HTC makes decisions that baffle me. The main thing they do wrong is they don’t make their handsets available. If I wanted to upgrade last year, I would not have had access to the One X. If I wanted to upgrade more recently, I would not have had access to the DNA. In fact, I’m not sure they’ve released a new phone on Sprint since last year’s Evo 4G LTE, which was an inferior phone to the One X. And I am not going to switch carriers for a phone, since I am very happy with Sprint.
Look what Samsung does. When it comes time for me to upgrade my crappy Evo 3D in May, I have no doubt the GS4 will be available on Sprint. There won’t be any question marks surrounding the manufacturer. Lemme say preemptively that I bet the M7 will be limited to one or two manufacturers, will have mediocre battery life, very good camera, very good screen resolution, no removable battery, and no expandable memory.
the only thing i don’t like about HTC is the battery life. I had an Eris, G2, and Sensation. The battery life was always awful. i switched to the Galaxy Nexus and have been with it since. I’m sure many HTC users would agree.
With the poor support I got for HTC Titan (Windows Phone) and not being able to upgrade from 7.5 to 7.8 , they have truly lost me as a customer. I will never buy another HTC product..
Expandable memory, one nice phone across every carrier, great battery life, the same awesome building quality, and the ability to root in 7 minutes (galaxy line) would turn things around but they don’t care. So I don’t care to buy. I’ve moved from the my touch 3g slide > g2 > my touch 4G > sensation > to the gs3. This one Samsung phone has made me never wanna look back.