It is not often that a business such as HTC falls from grace (not confirmed). In HTC’s case they are no longer a tier one manufacturer thus they need to wait for parts (while Samsung and Apple have parts shipped). Suddenly product launches need to be thought through carefully and planned with way more detail than in the past as demand for products need to be better calculated.
What happened, you might ask? Well, for starters Samsung took a huge chunk of market share away from their competitors by throwing millions of dollars at advertising. Suddenly, Samsung is front of mind and shipping millions of devices (in the US, the Samsung Galaxy S4 has shipped 10 millions devices in a matter of months). Samsung’s growth has put a lot of their competitors under huge pressure. HTC, I think is the biggest loser in this case.
Secondly, HTC lost focus. Their investment into Beats by Dre is clearly not returning the value they paid. That $300 million investment for 50% share in the company led to a buy back by Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine (co-founders of Beats by Dre) a year after the initial investment. This minor issue has contributed to a lot of their pain.
At the moment HTC is fighting for their lives and are losing senior staff by the day according to various media reports. That in itself paints a bad picture for HTC and could spell big trouble by year end. HTC have released some very good products in the first 2 quarters of this year. The HTC One looks amazing but the lack of mind share is leading to a lack of sales. Will HTC still exist in 2014?
