HTC Is Now Essentially Worthless (And Insecure)

No mention of Apple's successful legal attack on HTC over garbage patents like slide-to-unlock. Apple was able to block imports of HTC phones in 2012 back when they had the hot Evo brand and were introducing the One brand. HTC settled for an undisclosed amount that HTC has to pay Apple for every unit it sells. They have not been able to regain momentum since.

As Android soars to over 80% market share cheaper Chinese and Indian brands are dominating the market similar to OEM PC market. Vivo, ZTE, Alcatel, Coolpad, Lenovo, Huawei are a leader kicking Sony, LG, HTC out the market as they did with BlackBerry, Motorola, Nokia.[1]<p>Android One will set the bar even lower. Soon a phablet with 5&#x2F;6&quot; screen, 4GB memory, a quad core CPU and over 16GB storage with Android One may kill all Android Flagships if Google update promise work fine.<p>Smartphone conversion is topping and market is saturating. Market is reif for a new killer gadget but I don&#x27;t think it is a watch.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;communities-dominate.blogs.com&#x2F;brands&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;smartphone-wars-q2-scorecard.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;communities-dominate.blogs.com&#x2F;brands&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;smartph...</a>

They made some bad technology bets. They bet that a low light camera sensor (ie low megapixel, it has 4 MP) would do better in the market than the high megapixel camera .... big, big mistake. Whatever the gain in low light, consumers want a high resolution photo they can crop.<p>A couple of years ago I met the guy who owns the company that manufacturers the phone lenses. A real genius. As he passionately talked about optics I was busy thinking to myself &quot;your profits are doomed and you dont know it&quot;

How do I get me some HTC stock? I never purchased international stock before, but if it&#x27;s really trading for below cash, it might be a good buy. Something to research tomorrow.

tl;dr: &quot;HTC Is Now Essentially Worthless&quot;. That&#x27;s it.<p>This article is devoid of any content past the headline. TechCrunch is becoming worse than BuzzFeed.

&gt; The profit on an average Android phone is about a penny.<p>You what now? How? Is that wholesale - but even so...<p>this is fairly shocking news, but with margins like that we are just expecting manufacturers to run at a loss whilst funding from other revenue (Samsung presumably makes money from consumer electronics elsewhere)

&quot;The profit on an average Android phone is about a penny.&quot;<p>That sounds pretty unlikely to me. Is there anywhere this is demonstrated in more detail?

Eh maybe somebody can explain for me. This is surely just some aberration of using enterprise value as a metric for company health, while ignoring other important metrics, right?<p>Like the &#x27;value&#x27; of the company, as described here, is partially based on market sentiment, but doesn&#x27;t mean that the company is necessarily any less profitable or healthy than last year...? Surely many companies go in and out of having &quot;zero value&quot; just as a matter of course, in that case, given that shareprices could go down for reasons other than a decline in net profit, and cash assets could go down for reasons other than ill-health.

I wonder what this means for the Vive.

As someone still using an HTC One M7 and loves it, I don&#x27;t think HTC&#x27;s heart is in it anymore. The M9 was a retread of the M8, which itself was just a &quot;refinement&quot; of the M7. And somehow, despite two generations of refinement, the camera is still mediocre.[0] To boot, the HTC-built Nexus 9 got disappointing reviews, mostly due to build quality.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if they get out of the smartphone business altogether in the next few years to focus on stuff like the Vive or the RE camera.<p>[0]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;ianmorris&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;htc-one-m9-camera-fails-in-tests-its-worse-than-a-three-year-old-iphone-4s&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;ianmorris&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;htc-one-m9-...</a>

I can still remember a time when an HTC PDA was literally the hottest tech on the market. How fascinating it is to see how much has changed in less than a decade.

&gt;The profit on an average Android phone is about a penny.<p>This is an exageration right? I know we&#x27;re giving $10 to MSFT for every phone or whatever, but a penny?

When branding is only skin deep and you&#x27;re competing on price your days are numbered, from day 1.