HTC From Glory to Decline in the Smartphone Arena

TapTechNews July 20th news, as a pioneer of Android phone manufacturers in the early days, HTC once dominated the industry and created many classic phones. However, nowadays this brand may only represent a memory for us.

Patent battles and setbacks

Believe it or not, we still remember HTC's glory in 2011. That year, the company rivaled Nokia and Apple in the US market. Its shipments even surpassed Apple at one point and became one of the global smartphone powerhouses.

However, it was also in 2011 when the crisis came. On December 19th of that year, due to Apple's lawsuit, the US International Trade Commission ruled that some HTC phone products infringed Apple's patents and banned the sale of related products in the US. The sales ban directly hit HTC's performance. At the same time, Samsung launched the Galaxy series targeting the mid-to-high-end market and quickly grabbed the market released by HTC.

In 2012 November, Apple and HTC reached a settlement and withdrew all previous patent lawsuits and signed a ten-year cross-licensing agreement. However, HTC's good days in the US market never returned. Its market share in 2013 dropped by nearly half compared to 2012, and by 2014, in the HTC glorious end period, it was less than 5%.

And in Europe, HTC was continuously banned due to patent infringement against Nokia. In 2013, the star product HTC One was banned in the Netherlands; in October of the same year, some models were banned in the UK; in early 2014, some models of the company were banned in Germany again.

Due to all these patent lawsuits, HTC's global market share plummeted continuously, from 21% in 2011 to 2.5% in the first quarter of 2013, and even dropped out of the Top Ten Global Smartphones List in the second quarter.

The brand path barrier

Besides patent battles, another serious problem for HTC is born as an OEM and failed due to OEM.

HTC was originally a pure OEM company and relied heavily on custom phones from various major carriers. The company's first Android smartphone, HTC Dream (HTC G1), was launched in cooperation with US T-Mobile, so this phone was actually also known as T-Mobile G1.

In this cooperation, HTC seemed to have its own brand, but in fact, the company was still an OEM. The major carriers chose HTC as an OEM not because they valued HTC's brand value, but because this company's production capacity, technology and attitude are stronger than other OEMs. Obviously, this situation is not favorable for HTC's long-term development.

HTC also naturally realized this problem, so the company decided to take the brand path, that is, the HTC One/M7/M8/M9/10/U11/U12 series of phones that you guys are familiar with.

In 2013-2014, HTC still had an unshakable position in the market, so the HTC One series flagship phones that were launched at that time sold well and sales soared. This made Wang Xuehong misjudge the main reason for the soaring sales, thi nking that consumers loved its brand.

This misjudgment directly led to the consequence that the company did not focus on marketing mainly in the One era, but was dedicated to creating a so-called comparable to Apple, competing with Samsung high-end brand. However, this choice was not wise. Besides causing the manufacturing cost of high-end models to rise, it didn't get much attention from consumers, and the micro-innovations in工艺 or software were also learned by competitors, eventually consuming a lot of resources but not getting market returns, and in the end doing嫁衣 for others.

By 2016/2017, HTC still insisted on taking high-end phones as the main force, but by this time the company's R & D and marketing capabilities could no longer compete with those of competitors, resulting in a high price. At this time, the three major shipping channels of carriers, e-commerce, and offline stores were also unwilling to promote HTC's products, so only fan consumption could be attracted. Coupled with the HTC 10/LifeStyle phone differential treatment incident in the Chinese mainland market at that time, the company's reputation collapsed in important markets, Consumers don't like it, and distributors have no motivation either, and ultimately cannot escape the vicious cycle.

2017 September, under the squeeze of high-end phone markets of various brands, HTC sold its Pixel phone department to Google, and since then the company has faded out of the phone market and only launched one or two mid-to-low-end phones a year, such as the U23/pro and U24pro models that TapTechNews has reported in recent years, which are quite fan-oriented.

The phone business is gone, and physical stores are also closing one after another. Since 2017, the once-glorious HTC physical stores have been continuously closing. By the end of 2023, the company only has one physical store left in Tainan, Taiwan. At that time, there was a store exploration blogger who found that the store was even still selling HTC 10-era peripheral products.

And currently this HTC store has completely closed. According to the Tainan style post on Facebook, one of the stores has turned into a water-fried bun store. From this, we can see that the HTC sign is still left above the water-fried bun store, which is rather lamentable.

With the continuous rain and the few inches of screen world, it is the big stage for manufacturers to show their abilities. The winners gain fame and profit, while the losers fade away. Guys who are reading this article now, have you ever used an HTC phone?

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