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It may be the time for HTC to reconsider their tagline of “quietly brilliant”.
In an official interview today with the Wall Street Journal, HTC’s CEO Peter Chou commented on the HTC’s financial failures in 2012. According to Chou, HTC has fallen behind its competitors due to a lack of effective marketing.
This is a sentiment that echoes what HTC’s president of global sales and market, Jason Mackenzie, said during fall of 2012, when he stated that “Samsung spent four to six times more in advertising than us.”
Although Chou tried to remain upbeat in his interview with the Wall Street Journal, when commenting on the future of his company he said, “The worst for HTC has probably passed… 2013 will not be too bad.”
Chou is probably right on this count- short of going bankrupt, HTC can’t fall much further than it has in the last year. Despite having an astonishing profit margin of 13% in 2011, HTC saw a sharp decrease in their revenue as the effects of poor marketing tactics began to take their toll. By October of 2012, HTC saw an overall decrease of 61%; a devastating financial blow to the company.
If HTC is going to be able to survive the year, the company needs readjust their marketing strategy and branch out. For example, the One X was one of HTC’s top products for 2012. However, HTC managed to severely limit their customer base by making the One X available for AT&T users exclusively.
Although T-Mobile and Sprint picked up knock-offs of the One X (namely the “One S” and the “One V”), neither one of these phones are able to compete with the One X or any of the top of the line smartphones which are currently on the market. The other leading phone carrier, Verizon Wireless, passed on the “One” phones entirely.
After the “One X” came the Droid DNA in November. Despite the mildly-popular public reception of the new Droid phone, HTC was unable to recoup their large loss of profit from earlier in the year and is failing to keep up with Apple and Samsung. Although Chou claimed today that the company will be making a comeback as it releases new, innovative technology, it would take a miracle for HTC to regain a position of power among Apple and Samsung.
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