HTC suffers down month in May
The HTC One M8 is tasked with helping dig HTC out of the deep hole they’ve gotten themselves into, but it doesn’t seem to be doing quite as well as HTC would hope. The company posted their early unaudited results for the month of May, and they’re down not just month-over-month, but year-over-year, as well.
They saw a decrease of about 4.6% from April to May, which can be explained a couple of different ways. For starters, the HTC One M8 launched in April and the surge of sales helped HTC spike to an increase of about 36% over March. When you consider that number it was still a pretty good month for HTC, though we’re sure they would have liked to keep the increases rolling.
More alarming are the year-over-year numbers, where HTC lost about NT$7 billion (around $233 million). That is a drop of nearly 30%. HTC expects to meet their Q2 expectations despite those numbers, though they’ll need to get moving if they want to keep the revenue rolling in.
They’ve already made a few different moves to make that happen, including today’s revelation of a more affordable version of the HTC One M8. It’s clad in plastic and comes with internals that are slightly toned down, and that should result in a cheaper price tag for those who can’t quite hit the high-end budget HTC’s targeting. They’ve also committed to more consistent mid-range and entry-level devices, many of which have already been released in select markets.
HTC will also need to bounce back from a terrible marketing campaign that cost them billions of dollars and gained them little to no traction or mind share. Robert Downey Jr was cool in Iron Man, but he’s not quite good enough to sell a mobile phone, apparently. We’re obviously rooting for the company to do well because it would be a shame to see one less major competitor in the market.
[via HTC]