HTC Corp (宏達電) has fallen off the list of the world’s top 10 phone brands for a second consecutive quarter last quarter, a report by Gartner yesterday showed.
The report shows the Taiwanese smartphone vendor’s share of the global market fell to 1.3 percent during the first quarter of the year, from 1.4 percent in the previous quarter.
Its phone shipments fell 19.88 percent to 5.36 million units from 6.69 million during the fourth quarter of last year, the report showed.
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co retained its position as the world’s largest phone seller in the first quarter with a market share of 23.6 percent, followed by Finnish handset maker Nokia Oyj’s 14.8 percent and iPhone maker Apple Inc’s 9 percent.
HTC has also seen the popularity of its Droid DNA smartphone wane quickly, even though it said earlier that the model, which is a variant of HTC Battery for the Asian market, had generated strong sales.
Yesterday, Verizon Communications Inc, the largest US telecom carrier, launched a promotion plan to trim its two-year contract price for Droid DNA from US$199.99 to zero. Verizon said on its Web site that the promotion would last through Tuesday.
Verizon’s promotion comes one week after AT&T Inc, the second-largest US telecom carrier, slashed its price for the Facebook Home-based HTC First smartphone from US$99 to US$0.99 with a two-year agreement.
Released on April 12, the collaboration between Facebook and HTC was designed to test if Facebook Home, an application run on the Android operating system, would draw positive feedback from heavy online social networking netizens and smartphone users.
“HTC First really is an ‘experimental game product’ targeted at only Facebook members. The price drop is reasonable for AT&T because it can help clear out inventories,” Mega Investment Trust Corp (兆豐國際投信) senior analyst Kevin Hsu (許鈞雄) said yesterday by telephone.
Hsu said HTC’s new One model is likely to support the company’s sales through the third quarter of the year before Apple Inc starts selling its next generation iPhone.
However, given the chance that Apple might launch a mid-end smartphone this year, HTC would still have to develop more models or promote itself more strongly to improve its image and sales, Hsu said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last