HTC February Sales Fall Short

HTC has yet to see the fruits of its newly launched HTC One (to be available soon), but in the meantime, the company continues to register severe year-over-year decline in sales (and therefore in revenues). In February, HTC has generated $384M. Given that the company has previously guided the markets towards a $1.7B revenues guidance for Q1 (Jan, Feb, March) it seems a bit worrisome that the effective combined two first months of revenues top $900M (26.9 billion Taiwanese Dollars), which would leave the final month the only time left to generate a whopping $800M US dollars to reach the guidance. Even with the new HTC One, that seems like a stretch, but time will tell. Without a doubt, HTC is counting more than ever on a single handset to lift the company’s sales.

And to be fair, we really liked HTC’s new flagship smartphone as we played with it during its launch in New York. We still need to validate our first impressions with a full review, but it’s a good product. The issue for HTC is that other upcoming products like the Samsung Galaxy S4 may stall the sales until May when it becomes broadly available. While it’s been confirmed that Samsung won’t try to use massive amounts of aluminum in its designs, it’s been pretty much proven that its strategy of churning great products followed by massive marketing campaigns do wonders.

For HTC, the situation is becoming more difficult by the day, and if you add to the mix that LG has made a huge come back since the LG Optimus G, that Chinese manufacturers Huawei and ZTE are rising, and that Google is coming up with the X phone which promises to be awesome and aggressively priced… it’s a tough environment for everyone, but especially for HTC, since it doesn’t have a cash-generator like Google Search, or key display and processor technologies like Samsung and LG do.

What do you think? Can this year’s HTC One lift the company’s sales up?

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: business, HTC