HTC has been living in a bad economic situation for years. Revenues turned into losses some time ago, a situation the firm does not seem to know about. Neither the new figures, at the end of 2018, accompany. For the seventh consecutive year, they closed the year with losses. Despite this, the firm will continue to launch phones this new year, as announced a few months ago. HTC was one of the most successful smartphone manufacturers in the market at the beginning of the decade, but 2018 has been a terrible year for the Taiwanese company.
According to data released by HTC, 2018 was its seventh consecutive year with declining sales: the company in 2011 had revenues of 465 billion Taiwanese dollars. This year, it only received 23.7 billion Taiwanese dollars ( $770 million).
The financial situation of HTC is not particularly good; the company continues to be in financial straits since, in 2018, it lost 62% of its income. It has been a normal trend for the company since 2015 when it lost 35% of its revenues, 36% in 2016, and 21% in 2017. HTC has not known how to adapt to the times where cheap phones offer quality better price-to-performance ratio smartphone than the high-end flagships launched by Xiaomi or Huawei for the mid and low ranges.
HTC has tried to make money selling the company stocks or firing employees. In addition to selling its phone development division to Google for $1100 million, it also fired 1,500 employees during the past summer.
One of the main problems that the company has experienced is that its sales have barely grown in the last quarter of the year. It’s a time when brands sell more. But HTC has barely experienced changes in its sales in the summer months. So they have not benefited from the increase in sales on those dates.
The question is mainly how long the firm will be able to maintain this situation. It does not seem like they are going to change this negative trend. Although, HTC will continue to launch phones to the market in 2019. The firm has said that they want to focus its efforts on the high end in the first months of the year. But at the moment we do not know anything about mobile phones that will arrive.
