HTC has another tough quarter, with revenue down 13% YOY, but smaller losses – TechCrunch (Feb 15, 2017)

I don’t typically track HTC’s financials that closely, because they’re so small (just $700 million in revenue last quarter) and such a minor player at this point, but it’s worth checking in from time to time, especially as HTC expands beyond its traditional smartphone business into VR and ODM manufacturing for Google. Interestingly, there’s very little sign of any meaningful bump in revenues or profits from either of these initiatives, which either means that their contribution is tiny or that the traditional smartphone business is declining even faster than in the past. Revenue was down 13% year on year, and the company has had negative operating margins for seven straight quarters and most of the last three years. On the Q3 earnings call, HTC said that it was near breakeven on its smartphone business, and blamed the VR business for the overall losses. It also refuses to talk about the Pixel business at all on earnings calls, citing the lack of public disclosure by Google (which is odd because Google has confirmed it). Regardless, it’s worth noting that the company’s gross margin is just barely in the double digits, which obviously doesn’t leave much room for marketing and other corporate costs. HTC is one of a number of what were major Android vendors a few years back which have faded considerably, and unlike Sony it doesn’t yet seem to have figured out how to make the business work at its new smaller scale.

via TechCrunch

The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.

• HTC
• Vive

• Earnings
• Financials
• Q4 2016
• Smartphones
• VR

• Android is Hard
• AR vs VR
• Hardware is Hard

Vote for or share this post

Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.