HTC Corp (宏達電), the world’s largest maker of Microsoft Windows Mobile-based handsets, saw its sales drop 19.45 percent year-on-year to NT$14.31 billion (US$445 million) last month, the company said in a statement yesterday.
The figure was up 12.6 percent from October, when it reported NT$12.7 billion in sales, according to the company’s previous sales statement.
For the first 11 months of the year, sales totaled NT$130.81 billion, down 5.88 percent from the same period of last year, HTC said in the statement.
Last month’s figure was below market expectations of sales of between NT$15 billion and NT$16 billion, and the month-on-month growth also did not meet analyst estimates of an increase of between 20 percent and 25 percent.
Citigroup Global Markets analyst Kevin Chang (張凱偉) said yesterday that HTC might miss its fourth-quarter sales target, given that the company normally saw a monthly decline of around 20 percent in December sales.
Citigroup now predicts HTC’s fourth-quarter sales will be around NT$38.6 billion, which is lower than both market consensus and HTC’s own guidance forecast issued last month.
HTC told an investor conference on Nov. 9 that it expected fourth-quarter sales of between NT$40 billion and NT$42 billion.
HTC is also the first company to produce phones for Google Inc’s Android platform.
But Chang said a promotion package launched on Thursday night by HTC’s US partner Verizon Wireless, in which people who buy a Motorola Droid smartphone get a free HTC Droid Eris, implied poor sales in the US market.
“HTC’s Droid Eris may not be doing so well, so it needs to leverage the momentum of the Motorola Droid,” Chang wrote in a note.
“We’re sticking with our original fourth-quarter sales estimate,” Maggie Cheng (鄭雅蓮), a spokeswoman for Taoyuan-based HTC said by telephone yesterday, citing the company’s strong sales of its HD2 smartphone in Europe.
HTC introduced the HTC HD2 in October via a partnership with UK telecoms operator O2.
The company was also maintaining its whole-year sales forecast of around NT$144 billion, down 5 percent from last year’s NT$152.56 billion, Cheng said.
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