Many of us the tech nerds and everyday phone users have at least seen, touched used or ever heard of the mighty HTC. At one time, HTC overtook the present phone giants Samsung and iPhone in terms of sales globally including in the US.
What really led to the downfall of such a great, innovative smartphone company?
The rise of HTC started in 2008 when they released the first Android powered Smartphone the HTC dream. In the same year, they went on to release America’s first 4G smartphone (HTC evo 4G). HTC was slowly rising to the top in a market dominated by Nokia, iPhone and Blackberry.
In 2009,HTC went on to release a windows phone. HTC had a great design team and this caught the attention of Google. Google partnered with them to design the first Google smartphone, the Google Nexus One in 2010.
We were seeing a lot of firsts from HTC. What made them a powerhouse?
HTC phones were made from premium materials at a time most phones had plastic bodies . They were well designed, proportioned and had fully metallic bodies. Making them durable. HTC phones had stereo speakers powered by Beats Audio. HTC was ahead of its time
Secondly, HTC released the first Android powered smartphone in 2008 at a time when Widows OS, Symbian and iOS were at the top. The android Os had lots of drawbacks but HTC solved some of these issues and made it fun with a user friendly Ui (Touch 3D and Touchflo 3D)
The fall starts
Samsung enters the Android phone market.
After studying the phone market and seeing what HTC had accomplished, Samsung released their android themed Samsung Galaxy phone. With proper marketing through ads and collaborations with celebrities, the Samsung Galaxy sales began to skyrocket every quarter.
As Samsung was putting all efforts on their Galaxy series marketing, HTC felt comfortable. Well, their motto was “quietly brilliant.” They took the Apple approach of letting their products speak for themselves.
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They bought S3 Graphics a PC manufacturer for $300million with hopes using the company to manufacture hardware for HTC and other companies. Well, things didn’t turn out as planned. They went on to buy a 51% stake in Beats Electronics for $300 million and later sold it for $356 million.
A year later, Apple bought Beats Electronics for $3 billion.
HTC tried to diversify but all its ventures failed and this was the beginning of their failure.
By 2011, HTC market share had shrunk by half from 67% to 32% while Samsung’s shares re grew fivefold from 4% to 27% In 2012, Samsung was seeing yearly growth of about 300% and Apple 200%. Meanwhile HTC was standing still with only 17% of yearly growth.
Their naming scheme was even worse. They had phones named HTC Chacha, Salsa , Vivid and Velocity. They even repeated names like HTC One confusing buyers while Samsung’s naming scheme was simple( Samsung Galaxy S-followed by number).
In 2013, HTC lost their Vice President and other powerful board members. Microsoft began negotiations to purchase the crumbling company but later went for Nokia.
HTC lost track completely…they tried to get back into the smartphone business by releasing the U23 Pro but it didn’t receive good reception.
