HTC chairwoman and chief executive officer Cher Wang (王雪紅) yesterday apologized to shareholders for the company’s disappointing performance over the past few months.
Wang said HTC’s performance was mainly due to its poor operational efficiency and overly conservative marketing strategy amid fierce competition in the global market.
“HTC’s recent performance has let people down,” Wang said at the company’s annual general meeting.
Photo: CNA
Wang’s apology came a day after HTC’s stock price dropped below NT$100 to a 12-year low of NT$98. Shares stood as high as NT$1,300 on April 1, 2011.
This year’s HTC flagship One M9 smartphone, which was launched in April, was criticized for lacking differentiation from its previous model, the One M8. The smartphone also encountered thermal issues causing shipment delays after its sales launch.
In an effort to improve the company’s smartphone segment, HTC’s core business, Wang said the company plans to launch a “hero product” in October, and make significant improvements in innovation and design for the next flagship model next year.
The company is also planning to improve its product mix strategy for smartphones, she added.
Wang said HTC would reduce its production costs by improving production efficiency as well as optimizing its components supply chain, adding that it would also outsource some orders to increase operational flexibility.
Saying that the marketing budgets of Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co are 20 times higher than HTC’s, Wang said the firm must improve its marketing strategies.
Chief financial officer Chang Chia-lin (張嘉臨) said that HTC increased research and development investment by 4 percent annually to NT$13 billion (US$419.33 million) last year, while its marketing expenses dropped 19.26 percent to NT$26 billion from a year ago.
HTC does not sell well using conventional marketing strategies, Wang said, adding that it would not renew US actor Robert Downey Jr’s contract after this year, but that it would keep working with the popular Taiwanese rock group Mayday (五月天).
In an attempt to develop new business, HTC would develop virtual reality applications, such as the HTC Vive virtual reality headset that it developed with US-based game developer Valve, Wang said.
Wang said that the HTC Vive, which was unveiled at the annual World Mobile Congress in Barcelona in March, has been well-received by the market and that the company would focus on virtual reality development.
“I am upbeat about HTC’s outlook. We aim to focus on developing the right products,” Wang said.
The company has not announced a launch date for the Vive.
At an investors’ conference in February, Chang said that HTC hopes the non-smartphone segment can contribute at least 10 percent of the firm’s total revenues next year.
HTC’s shares closed up 0.51 percent at NT$98.5 in Taipei trading yesterday, while the TAIEX lost 0.12 percent.
This week’s undoing of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and its sister token, Luna, has ramifications for all of crypto. First, there is the immediate impact: The rapid collapse of a once-popular pair of cryptocurrencies sent a ripple effect across the industry, contributing to plummeting coin prices that wiped hundreds of billions of market value from the digital-asset market and stoked worries over the potential fragility of digital-asset ventures. Then there are the knock-on effects. In addition to delivering punishing losses to individual users and investment firms, the spectacular failure of a market darling like Terra threatens to have a cooling effect
China’s biggest chipmaker has cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC, 中芯) estimates a month-long lockdown in Shanghai could spur component shortages and logistics tangles, and erase about 5 percent of its output in the second quarter. “We are trying our best to mitigate the impact on product delivery,” SMIC Chairman Gao Yonggang (高永崗) told analysts on a call yesterday morning. “We are still assessing the actual impact as many suppliers restart their
DISRUPTIONS: The war in Ukraine, China’s lockdown measures, rising interest rates and inflation have thrown a wrench into business plans made years in advance Samsung Electronics Co is talking with foundry clients about charging as much as 20 percent more for making semiconductors this year, joining an industry-wide push to hike prices to cover rising costs of materials and logistics. Contract-based chip prices are likely to rise around 15 percent to 20 percent, depending upon the level of sophistication, people familiar with the matter said. Chips produced on legacy nodes would face bigger price hikes, while new pricing would be applied from the second half of this year, they said, adding that Samsung has finished negotiating with some clients and is in discussions with others. Samsung’s decision
material SHORTAGE: Even as workers are about to return, Quanta lacks operating supplies, while Pegatron reported its lowest revenues in 11 quarters, the companies said Taiwan’s major Apple Inc supplier cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing China’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), which assembles MacBooks, expects a 20 percent quarterly fall in notebook shipments and a squeeze on margins this quarter due to the lockdown, a company representative said on Friday during an earnings call. The impact from supply chain disruptions could last until the end of the year, she said. The company’s Shanghai factory has been operating under tight restrictions since the middle of last month,
RSS