"If there are only two mobile phone manufacturers in the future, then HTC will definitely be one of them." HTC at that time was so confident. When
was at its peak, it forced to publicly state that HTC is the largest competitor.
However, this king of Android phones has since declined rapidly and has fallen into a dilemma of "selling teams, selling patents, and selling factories". Recently, it even stated on its official website that companies have no mobile phones for sale in the mainland market.
HTC, how did you "do" yourself?
01: When you have a daughter, you should talk about HTC like Wang Xuehong
, you can't avoid this legendary woman Wang Xuehong.
Wang Xuehong, the daughter of Wang Yongqing, the second wife of the former "richest man in Taiwan", Wang Yongqing, but even though she was born well, she would not be the eldest daughter.
When she was still in school, her father had the idea of marrying a third wife, and her mother was so angry that she ran away from the United States. She only had US$3,000 with her when she left.
His mother used this $3,000 to buy a house, and this house was finally mortgaged by Wang Xuehong to the bank for a startup loan, thus creating VIA Electronics .
Wang Xuehong can say proudly: I didn’t ask my father for a penny to start my own business.
Facts have proved that she is indeed very talented in business operations. In just a few years, she developed VIA Electronics into the world's second largest chip company, second only to Intel . At its peak, its chipset once occupied 70% of the global market share.
It was not until Intel launched a patent war against it that the giant company died and became a myth of the past.
In 1997, Wang Xuehong started a business again and joined hands with 8 other engineers to establish "HD ", which is HTC. At the beginning of its establishment, HTC played a similar role as Foxconn , providing OEM services to brands such as Dell , HP , etc.
But even for OEM services, HTC is doing it very well. In 2001, nearly half of the nearly 3 million handheld computers shipped worldwide were manufactured by HTC.
By 2002, HTC, which had saved some capital, was eyeing the mobile phone market and decided to build an independent brand. So in October of that year, Dopad mobile phone emerged, but due to many factors, it did not cause much response in the market, and the branding strategy ended in failure.
But HTC did not give up and continued to launch new phones in the years since then.
Until 2007, HTC launched the "Afu Machine", which uses interactive operation technology and has its own logo for the first time. Since then, the HTC mobile phone brand has entered a golden period of development.
In 2008, it released the world's first Android phone; in 2010, it entered the mainland market and cooperated with Google to produce mobile phones, becoming the world's second largest mobile phone manufacturer after Apple; in 2011, it was even the peak of HTC, with the shipment of 43 million mobile phones soaring the company's market value to US$33.6 billion.
Wang Xuehong and his wife naturally also rose, becoming the richest man in Taiwan at that time, even surpassing their father Wang Yongqing's assets.
It is precisely because of this that she has been crazy sought after by local Taiwanese people, and the saying "If you have a daughter, you should be like Wang Xuehong" is born.
02: Falling from the altar
"If there are only two mobile phone manufacturers in the future, then HTC will definitely be one of them." Wang Xuehong once said this, but she never expected that HTC would suffer a heavy blow at its most glorious time.
In 2011, although Apple still ranks first in the world, its shipments in the US domestic market were not as good as HTC. He felt deeply threatened and launched a patent lawsuit, accusing HTC of infringement and demanded that the government ban the sale of the brand's mobile phones.
In this year-long patent war, HTC had to stop moving forward due to technical restrictions. Taking advantage of this opportunity, , Samsung, and Apple made every effort to erode HTC's market share.
In the end, HTC lost the case, was completely driven out of the United States, and lost most of the high-end market, but the bad luck has just begun.
Blackberry , Nokia , Microsoft also imitated Apple to launch a patent lawsuit to encircle HTC, and HTC ushered in a major defeat.
In 2012, HTC withdrew from the Brazilian and South Korea markets; in 2013, the UK and Netherlands banned some HTC products; in 2014, Germany also joined the ban queue.
In addition to the enemy's stabbing, HTC was also betrayed by allies.
In 2013, HTC was affected by Google's internal strife. The cameras of the new phone could not be adapted to Android, forcing Wang Xuehong to seek help from mainland manufacturers, Microsoft and Amazon , but the result all ended in failure and his vitality was severely damaged again.
After the overseas market was set, HTC placed its hopes of revival in the mainland market, but failed again for various reasons.
first. At that time, the domestic market had been occupied by brands such as vivo, oppo, Xiaomi , Huawei , Meizu , and HTC had no advantage in cost-effectiveness.
Second, the ugly design accelerates the escape of consumers.
In 2014, the HTC One M8 released by HTC actually has 4 chins, from bottom to top, the machine bottom bar, logo bar, virtual buttons, and inner menu. This design not only seriously invades screen space, but also makes many users so ugly that they say they are discomfort and complain that it is the ugliest smartphone, no doubt about it.
3, HTC's neglect to mainland consumers has aroused dissatisfaction among Chinese people. There are such jokes online criticizing HTC: selling high-quality products to European and American products, selling inferior products to themselves, and selling inferior products to mainland China.
Take HTC 10 released in 2016 as an example. It is obviously a very powerful flagship phone, but it was sold to the mainland for a "castrated version". Not only did the chip be replaced with a low-end product, but the memory has also shrunk by 1GB, and it does not even have the dual-slot and dual standby function.
This behavior of discriminating against mainland China and treating differently is heartbroken even by HTC's severe fans.
In 2016, its global shipments were only 10 million, less than one-quarter of the peak; by 2017, HTC, which had only 0.6% of the market share, fell from the top 10 mobile phone manufacturers in the world and was still in the quagmire of losses.
03: HTC, which had no choice but to transform into
, finally reached a deal with Google in September 2017, handing over some patents and a R&D team of about 2,000 people to the other party. The 1.1 billion US dollars received in
were later used to develop VR. Even Wang Xuehong himself publicly stated that the company will focus its business center on VR in the future.
However, can VR really save the declining HTC?
HTC's success in entering the mobile phone field in the past is largely due to the popularity of smartphones and the alliance with Google and Android; but VR is different, this field has not yet reached its peak.
is not clear in image quality, lack of consumer content, and price tags of tens of thousands... Under many factors, the VR consumer market has not been able to survive the cold winter. Taking the US market as an example, its penetration rate is only 1.6%.
Therefore, even though HTC has developed well in the VR field and has ranked among the top three manufacturers in the world, its size is getting smaller and smaller, less than one-tenth of its peak.
In 2020, HTC's revenue was 1.33 billion yuan, but its losses were as high as 1.38 billion yuan. Some media figures even bluntly said: HTC's annual revenue is not as good as AirPods' half-month revenue. Compared with
before and after, it is really sad.
In the past two years, HTC, which has suffered setbacks in VR, has been making continuous moves in the 5G mobile phone field. Can this former mobile phone giant make a comeback and create new glory?
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Author: Xiang Nan
