htc Why HTC may be doomed no matter how good its devices are

[V-Tech]

Although its HTC One has received across-the-board acclaim as one of the world?s best smartphones, HTC still finds itself in dire straits. Businessweek?s Joshua Brustein has written what amounts to an advice column for HTC that ironically shows all the ways that the company may not be able to compete with rival Samsung no matter how good its devices are.

Among other things, Brustein thinks HTC should mimic Samsung by putting together enormously expensive launch events and by getting its supply chain in better shape to produce on a mass scale. But given that HTC has seen its earnings plummet in recent quarters, dumping money into extravaganzas that match Samsung?s launch events might not be the best idea.

Since those two suggestions seem to be non-starters, Brustein?s only other substantive suggestion for HTC is to have better relationships with carriers. In particular, Brustein takes HTC to task for its puzzling decision to offer the HTC One on every major American carrier except for Verizon, which just happens to be the largest wireless carrier in the United States. But even this is something of a Catch-22 since Brustein admits that ?carriers are going to be more interested in manufacturers that can offer more sales? and that ?no one does scale like Samsung.?

All of which is a long way of saying that Brustein basically wants HTC to be more like Samsung even though it doesn?t have the resources to do so. If that?s the best advice that the company can get, then it might be in even more trouble than many people think.

http://bgr.com/2013/05/28/htc-samsung-rivalry-analysis/

[techbeck]

Yea, WTF HTC...I would get the One over Samsung any day if it was available on Verizon. You make good products but stupid decisions.

[Osiris]

Mimicking samsung isnt the way, HTC are just in a rough patch, they abandoned their bread and butter with windows mobile (with good reason) in favour of android but then they failed to properly innovate their products and now samsung dominates the Android space. They haven't invested enough in Windows Phone (and its still an emerging third option) so the scale for profit isnt there.

I wouldn't say they are screwed but they are in for a period of reduced growth, I imagine they will cut back production to core flagships and possibly persue a low cost emerging markets strategy like Nokia. I agree they need to get their marketing, supply and support chains up to a new standard but not marketing in the sense of "an extravogent launch event" marketing in the sense of advertising to every day consumers, even in little ole Australia I see Nokia and samsung ads everywhere..

[jakem1]

I wouldn't say the HTC One has received universal praise. I've read a number of articles that have been quite critical of the low quality photos it produces and of course there's the bad publicity they got using stolen microphone tech.

[Growled Member]

I owned one HTC phone and I would never own another. It was one of the worst phones I've ever used. I'm not surprised to see them going down the toilet if a lot of their former customers feel like me.

[.Neo]

I remember getting an HTC Legend in the summer of 2010. It's original release date in the Netherlands? April 2010. It received its last official software update in October of the same year. Hilarious.

Never getting an HTC again.

[tsupersonic]

Yea, WTF HTC...I would get the One over Samsung any day if it was available on Verizon. You make good products but stupid decisions.

You really think it's all HTC? I'd put the blame on Verizon mostly. That and if the Droid DNA wasn't released on Verizon, the One would likely be on Verizon right now. I got fed up with Verizon and went to AT&T. AT&T gets all the major phones, and plus I travel around the world, so having a GSM device helps.