After HTC’s recent posting of its first ever quarterly loss it’s no shock to hear Lenovo and HTC have been meeting in secret to discuss the company’s future. Namely, that HTC is considering selling up and letting Lenovo take the reins.
The story seems to have originated on the Taiwanese site Apple Daily and doesn’t include too many details beyond the two companies having been in acquisition talks since late August.
Running counter to this rumor, a report from Reuters quotes Cher Wang, a low-profile chairwoman and co-founder owning 3.8% of HTC’s stocks, as stating the company is not for sale. No official statement from the joint HTC board or the CEO, Peter Chou, has been released.
Possible, even plausible
It’s no secret that once a company gets downward momentum in the smartphone market it’s almost impossible to turn things back around. Motorola was acquired by Google, Nokia is now being taken over in part by Microsoft and BlackBerry seems destined to be sold off in chunks. HTC may only be at the beginning of its fall from grace, but it might be wise to sell up before the brand name loses credibility.
Lenovo is an established hardware maker that has successfully penetrated the valued Chinese smartphone market. It’s also shown its willingness to buy its way in to the western portable device market through its questionably successful purchase of the ThinkPad brand from IBM. It’d be well within Lenovo’s interests to buy HTC, especially when the problems being faced seem to be with marketing, rather than device quality.
The trouble with HTC
HTC’s woes don’t stem from its devices. The HTC One is absolutely still one of the best handsets on the market. It was a worthy challenger to the Samsung Galaxy S4 in terms of specs and functionality, and it knocked it out of the park when it came to physical design. It is simply a fantastic, well-made device that six months later still deserves its position as company flagship.
Unfortunately, HTC was once again crushed by Samsung’s marketing machine. Despite our own office, as well as countless other tech bloggers, being utterly torn between the S4 and One, the S4 was much more strongly greeted by the greater portion of consumers. Samsung has spent the last 4 years steadily and unremittingly building its reputation with the public, while HTC tagged along behind being “Quietly Brilliant” and fading from the limelight.
HTC definitely needs a change in management if it’s going to get people to understand how great its handsets are. The question now is if that change is going to come in the form of a new CEO, a new parent company or, most disastrously, not at all.
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