The Fall from grace of HTC

 

What was HTC?

Anyone who grew up in the smartphone boom of the 2010s will definitely have knowledge about a smartphone company called HTC. It was 'the' smartphone that everyone had who was not holding an Iphone and was the first smartphone for 90% of the people who are currently using either a samsung phone or an Iphone.'Chances are, if you owned a smartphone from 2009-2013 it was an HTC. Even the First ever android phone was launched by HTC in 2008 called the HTC dream and was immediately in direct competition with the original Iphone. Even though it wasn't as good as the original Iphone the 'dream' established HTC as a smartphone leading company in the android side of things.

HTC was the cheaper and better Iphone that everyone either had or wanted to have. HTC understood design and the attention to detail that was severely lacking in other smartphone makers at the time. The HTC M1 shown below is still considered to be an all time classic smartphone due to its revolutionary hardware that dwarfed the Iphones and the first phone to introduce the concept of stereo speakers in a mobile phone. By launching phones like the M1, the HTC dream, HTC wildfire and many more HTC was changing the smartphone industry single handedly and the first choice for anyone not wanting an Iphone.

Then, what happened?

In the beginning when smartphones were just starting in 2008-2010 HTC was a company producing smartphones way ahead of its time and HTC owned 67% of the smartphone market at the time and was the biggest smartphone manufacturing company in the world, even bigger than apple.

So, what went wrong? How did a company so big disappeared so quickly that kids growing up today don't even recognise the name HTC?. Well there are many factors to this and let's talk about them.

1. Competition:

In 2010 HTC was the biggest smartphone company in the world with apple being in 2nd place. But, a new company in the smartphone world was just getting popular called Samsung. HTC was producing full aluminum uni-body phones in an era when Samsung was making plastic phones. But as the time went on Samsung boosted in popularity making better and better smartphones every year with features like AMOLED screens and edged screeens while HTC got lazy and relied on the same design they had been doing fot years and not seeing what the competition like samsung and apple were producing at the time and as a result in 2011 alone  HTC went from 67% to 32% in market share while Samsung grew from 4% to 27% market share and it marked the beginning of the end for HTC.

2. Bad Investments:

At the height of its popularity and the rising days of Samsung the CEO of HTC decided to invest in streaming services and then invested 90 million dollars in streaming services. HTC then bought 'beats by dre' for 51 million dollar and then sold it for 56 million dollar but after some time apple bought 'beats by dre' for 3 billion dollars. At the same time Samsung used all of its manufacturing capabilities to focus only on smartphones and made much better smartphones than HTC and then quickly became the smartphone leader and continuous bad marketing and bad investments led to HTC fall of the minds of users and ultimately leading to the fall of the company.

3. The change in direction:

I think the main reason that HTC fell off the radar during the last 5 years basically comes down to the reason that HTC simply stopped innovating and relied on is previous designs that became aged compared to the new Samsung, Huawei or Apple technology.

This is an HTC U11 in a side by side comparison with the Samsung galaxy S8 and I think this picture is enough to tell anyone what I mean when I say HTC failed to keep up with other companies. The HTC phone looks like a smartphone from 2011 compared to Samsung. HTC relied only on its brand name and previous work for far too long and it backfired massively for the company. As a result people forgot about HTC as a serious smartphone manufacturing company and always preferred Samsung and huawei phones over HTC.

What now?

After all the bad investments and loosing firm ground in the smartphone market. HTC changed its CEO and in 2018 started to make decisions in the right direction and they joined Valve in the Virtual Reality business. HTC now actually own 13% of the worlds VR market and are doing quite well to keep the company running. They occasionally release smartphones with very little to none sales and generally focus  on its Virtual Reality business in which they hold a good portion of the market.

What was once the tech giant and the biggest smartphone company in the world and was destined to be the market leader for years to come now only remains as a smartphone company in the minds of its the people who once made it their priority to buy an HTC phone only due to some bad decisions, bad investments and not recognizing in time the direction in which the world was heading. All of these factors led to the fall from grace of what was once reported as the biggest smartphone manufacturing company in the world.