How To Collapse: do slumping sales and an executive exodus spell doom for HTC? – The Verge

HTC phone chief quits as company prepares for what may be its last flagship

2018-02-14T04:59:12-05:00

HTC U11 Plus | Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge

News out of Taiwan today is that HTC's president of smartphone and connected devices business is resigning, effectively immediately. Chialin Chang, who'd previously served as HTC's CFO and, between 2013 and 2017, its head of global sales, was one of the last remaining high-level executives not to have departed the company. But the position he was occupying started to look redundant after HTC sold off most of its smartphone design and engineering team to Google for $1.1 billion.

HTC hasn't yet quit the smartphone business entirely, as the company has already promised a dual-camera flagship phone for 2018, which we can surmise is the U12 that …

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HTC will no longer give guidance for the future it doesn’t have

2015-10-30T05:03:02-04:00

Each month for the past six months, HTC has recorded a double-digit decline in revenues relative to 2014. For a company that wasn't making all that much money in the first place, and whose most notable achievement in recent times has been to stabilize and break even last year, 2015 has been nothing short of a disaster. It is within this dire context of deflated momentum and negative growth that HTC has now decided to stop issuing forward guidance as part of its earnings reports.

Reporting revenue of $657 million for the third quarter of this year, down from nearly $1.3 billion the previous year, HTC declined to advise investors and financia …

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How To Copy: HTC’s iPhone clone could be the One I’ve been waiting for

2015-10-13T07:05:26-04:00

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Of all the phone manufacturers in all the vast and diverse lands of Android, HTC was the last company I expected to see producing an iPhone clone. Like Nokia (the original one, not the hollowed-out husk that remains today), HTC has been a long-time innovator in smartphone design and engineering. Its habit is to lead, not follow. And yet, just over a week from now, HTC will unveil its next hero phone, expected to be called the Aero, and well… it looks like an iPhone.

To compete with the iPhone, just build your own iPhone

I know what the HTC apologist will say, because I have one within me, expounding on the history of the HTC One M7 preceding …

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HTC loses its second chief designer in less than a year

2015-03-27T01:31:07-04:00

Just 11 months after HTC's longtime chief of design, Scott Croyle, was revealed to be leaving the company, one of his former allies who stepped in to fill the void has also departed. HTC has confirmed that Jonah Becker has left the company, having previously served as its head of product design. Becker and Croyle joined HTC six years ago, when their design studio One & Co was acquired by the Taiwanese company.

Great times RT @scroyle: blast from the past. @JonahABecker good luck on your next step. @Claudibus good luck @htc pic.twitter.com/WHFneanMRb
- Jonah Becker (@JonahABecker) March 27, 2015

HTC has a new person in charge of smartphone de …

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HTC can’t get no respect

2015-03-25T12:10:12-04:00

"Oh, when I was a kid, I got no respect.
I played hide and seek.
They wouldn't even look for me."

Like the late American comedian Rodney Dangerfield, HTC is a company suffering from a chronic lack of respect. The Taiwanese phone maker has a pedigree of mobile innovation rivaling that of Nokia and Apple, but last week it had to change its CEO amid ambivalent feedback to its latest smartphone and a struggle to generate consistent profits. There are many challenges for new CEO Cher Wang to overcome in the months ahead, but beside the technical issue of just building better cameras, probably the most critical among them will be to reestablish t …

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Unwilling to change its phones, HTC changes CEO instead

2015-03-20T07:16:15-04:00

On the brink of its biggest product launch of the year, HTC has delivered the unexpected news that it's appointing a new Chief Executive Officer. Peter Chou, who had filled the role since 2005 and led HTC's rise from an anonymous contract manufacturer to a global smartphone brand, is being replaced by company co-founder Cher Wang.

Wang immediately becomes the focal point of all decision making at HTC, taking responsibility for broad corporate strategy as well as final product decisions. This marks the formalization of a handover of power that began in 2013 when Chou was said to be temporarily offloading operational duties to Wang in order t …

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HTC replaces CEO Peter Chou with Cher Wang

2015-03-20T03:00:19-04:00

Peter Chou is out as CEO of HTC, and chairperson Cher Wang is his replacement. Chou will "transition to a strategic new role leading future product innovation" as head of HTC's Future Development Lab. Wang co-founded HTC in 1997, and in 2013 Chou handed her more of his CEO responsibilities in what was said to be a temporary move. She will also retain her chairperson position. "As an entrepreneur at heart, I am excited to see so many new opportunities, and I am honoured to accept this opportunity to help shape the next stage of HTC's development," Wang said in a statement.

Wang takes the reins at a period of transition for HTC: its last two …

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HTC quarterly sales rise for the first time in three years

2015-01-06T04:35:01-05:00

Smartphone maker HTC has recorded its first quarterly year-on-year sales and revenue growth in more than three years. The Taiwanese company rode new mid-range headsets and devices targeted at developing markets such as India to a sales rise of NT$5 billion ($156 million) year-on-year - sales rose to NT$47.9 billion ($1.5 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2014, up from the NT$42.9 billion ($1.34 billion) HTC posted in Q4 2013.

HTC has struggled to maintain a strong presence in the contested smartphone market in recent years, with slumping sales and an exodus of executives boding badly for the company's future. But by selling mid-range device …

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HTC is lost, and this blind camera isn’t helping

2014-10-09T09:50:40-04:00

"The smartphone is just the overture of HTC's grand opera."

Phones are now cheaply made commodities, and the company that makes them the sole focus of its business doesn't survive long in the modern world. Motorola, Nokia, and Palm were all sold off to richer conglomerates, Sony Ericsson was reabsorbed into Sony, and BlackBerry is just hanging on by the resilient thread of its enterprise services. Until yesterday, HTC was the last holdout as an independent smartphone maker, but now it too is embracing the winds of inevitable change.

Having tried and failed to build profitably unique features into its phones, HTC is now moving beyond them w …

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HTC’s new flagship phone is designed to take over Japan

2014-08-19T05:38:15-04:00

HTC CEO Peter Chou was in Tokyo today to unveil the company's latest flagship smartphone for Japan, the new J Butterfly (HTL23) on KDDI. The phone has much in common with the excellent HTC One (M8) released in the rest of the world earlier this year: it features a 5-inch 1080p display, twin front-facing BoomSound speakers, a second camera lens to allow for Lytro-style refocusing after taking the shot (though the main sensor is 13 megapixels rather than the M8's four-"ultrapixel" unit), and so on.

But the J Butterfly has a few tweaks that bring it in line with local expectations - it's waterproof and dustproof, with features like a TV tuner, …

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