What you need to know
- HTC's most recent financial report shows the company made $333 million in 2019.
- Compared to 2018, that's over a 50% drop and a massive 87% drop from 2017.
- HTC switched tactics last year, focusing on selling mid-range phones to India and pushing its Vive VR headsets.
HTC was once one of the most prominent Android handset makers around. In the past, it pioneered some of the best hardware in the mobile space by innovating — creating phones with stereo front-facing speakers and metal unibodies.
Unfortunately, HTC's revenue has been in a steady decline since 2011, and 2019 isn't looking any better for the company. According to its most recent financial disclosure, HTC earned $333 million in 2019. That's over a 50% drop from 2018 where it posted $789 million in profits, and a massive decline from the $2 billion it earned in 2017, right before Google acquired a massive portion of HTC's mobile hardware division.
To help put that into perspective, Bloomberg columnist Tim Culpan points out that Apple now makes more selling Airpods in two weeks than HTC makes in an entire year. When speaking to TechCrunch last year, HTC CEO Yves Maitre addressed the company's decline in the mobile market, citing that it had stopped innovating with smartphone hardware because it was investing in virtual reality.
Currently, HTC sells a line of VR headsets under the Vive branding but has yet to disclose how many units it has sold. When it comes to the smartphone market, the company has switched tactics and is focusing on selling mid-range phones to India, the second-largest smartphone market in the world.
At this time, HTC still hasn't posted its results for the last quarter in 2019 which just ended in December. However, all signs point to it being another drop in profit for the once-popular and profitable Taiwanese smartphone maker.
