HTC’s financial woes have continued month after month for a few years now. No matter what they do they cannot seem to take a break and now they appear to be heading further in the wrong direction laying off 1500 staff.
Each quarter we see the financials from HTC and they are troubling. Even though they make some really good phones they just cannot seem to turn a profit. Last year they “sold” a couple of thousand workers to Google for over a billion US dollars but that seems short-sighted considering the importance of the software engineers now heading to Google.
HTC have told Reuters that it would cut 1,500 jobs in its manufacturing unit in Taiwan, approximately a quarter of its global 6,450 staff. This is expected to be completed by September of this year:
Today HTC announces plan toust optimize the manufacturing organizations in Taiwan … This plan will allow more effective and flexible resource management going forward
HTC’s sales have suffered lately with them reporting a 55.5% drop in April revenues year-on-year after a 46.7% decrease in March. This year they are putting all their eggs into one basket, the U12+ and while it is an amazing device there are teething issues. HTC have promised that there is a software fix coming for those touch issues and after having tested a retail version of the U12+ I can say that the Edge Sense 2.0 squeeze issues are mostly resolved (its needs to be squeezed with a claw rather than fingertips).
We sincerely hope that HTC do fix these issues as without a fix they may struggle to survive another year, although we have been hearing of the death knell for a few years now. If the issues are fixed the U12+ will be right near the top of devices we recommend and hopefully it will help HTC’s bottom line.
How do you feel about HTC’s direction? Can they recover from this? Do you have an answer for them?
HTC needs to do what Hyundai did in the car industry. They should accept that they have lost their market share. And rather than trying to bash their heads against the wall (read Samsung), they need to claw back some market share. Just like Hyundai brought out cars that were feature rich but at a budget price, HTC need to concentrate on the mid-market with feature rich phones at a budget price. Once they have gained some market share, and moved into the black, then they can think about flagship phones. Problem is, HTC think they can still compete in… Read more »
So true! If they focus on the enthusiast market ala Oneplus, price it against the likes of the Oneplus 6 and Xiaomi Mi8 – then the customers will come back to them. Imagine if they launched the U12+ in AU at $700 mark!