If your company is in trouble financially, you can either invest more money to create more products and therefore increase sales, or you can just limit the products that you will release and focus on those flagships. It looks like Taiwanese OEM HTC may be going for the latter strategy as an unverified report says that they will only be releasing a handful of smartphones for 2018. It can either be a cost-cutting measure to get the company back on its feet, or they really are willing to let go of the mobile division, which has been the rumor for some time now.
According to alleged industry sources, HTC will only release at least two and at most four models for 2018. Two of them are already expected: the mid-range version of the HTC U11+, which will reportedly come out in January; and the next flagship, which will probably the HTC U12. Whether those are the only two that will be released remains to be seen. They may be employing the strategy of OnePlus, which one releases a handful of products every year but brings out all the stops in promoting and marketing them.
But HTC may actually be slowly easing itself out of the mobile business. There are previous reports that Google will be buying the division. What happened was that the tech giant actually acquired a large number of employees from HTC’s mobile division. Having fewer smartphones to release, market, and sell, may very well be the way for them to crawl out of the financial problems they’re currently experiencing.
They reported net losses of NT$7.102 billion for the first three quarters of 2017. If they do let go of mobile, they might focus more on the more lucrative business, the virtual reality market. We’ll keep a close eye on this one if news develops further.
VIA: DigiTimes
