Albeit being one of the best known smartphone makers on the market, HTC’s mobile division has been faltering for quite some time. Now a recent report claims that things are going so bad that the Taiwanese device maker is looking to sell its phone making subsidiary.
Given HTC’s current status, it’s not exactly inconceivable the company might be on the lookout for alternatives. The Pixel maker recently posed its Q3 financial results, revealing a $57 million profit loss in its mobile division.
The company said its latest flagship the HTC 10 has been embraced by the market. Despite the phone being pretty solid, it seems that customers prefer other brands.
HTC recently released a new smartphone bound exclusively for Sprint and called Bolt. The device maker is marketing it as an improved version of the HTC 10. However, the phone takes advantage of last year’s chipset – the problematic Snapdragon 810. A puzzling choice which won’t help much with sales, if you ask us.
Anyway, current rumors claim that HTC’s general manager, Cher Wang recently got in touch with collaborators in order to give them the heads up about the sale which will purportedly happen in spring 2017.
The Taiwanese device maker was quick to deny the rumors on Weibo, but analysts claim this is exactly what companies tend to do before a major sale agreement. Four Taiwanese companies are already said to be interested.
Acquisitions like these happen all the time in the mobile world. Microsoft bought Nokia and Motorola got absorbed by Lenovo, so HTC might soon follow a similar path. Recently the company manufactured the Pixel phones for Google, so it wouldn’t be a huge shock if the search giant ended up incorporating HTC.
On the other hand, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard HTC was looking to sell its mobile business. Last year, the rumor mill was claiming laptop maker ASUS was entertaining the possibility of buy HTC. The same was said about Xiaomi, but to this day nothing of the sorts happened to this day, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
That being said, HTC isn’t all about smartphone. The company is said to be working on a smartwatch product codenamed “Halfbeak” and recently went into VR by partnering with Valve for the Vive VR headset.
I really wanted an HTC 10 when I was in the market for a new phone this summer. However it’s specs were identical to the Axon 7 yet getting an unlocked HTC 10 was going to be hundreds of dollars more for nothing. So I went with the Axon 7. Sorry HTC I know I’ve owned a ton of your phones before but I can’t just shell out hundreds of dollars more just because of your name. It’s not worth it for my hard earned cash. In the end I love my Axon 7.