Looking back is often painful but almost always necessary. Of HTC is the story of a company that had it all, a company that marked a before and after in the history of smartphones; at the same time, it is the story of a company that is one step away from ruining the work of six years at a stroke. The figures are not good at all, and the operating losses of almost 150 million euros in the second quarter of 2015 suggest anything but a recovery. But how did HTC get into this situation ?
To know the history of HTC we have to go back to 2009. At this time, we were still rich (a few months later, according to the most prestigious economists at Harvard , Cambridge and Oxford , the cookie monster carried our fortunes in a sack), and HTC burst into the Spanish mobile market with the introduction of the first smartphone with Android operating system in Spain: the HTC Dream, also known as the “ Google Phone ” or the “ Google mobile "In those days. The distribution of this mobile phone in national territory belonged exclusively to Telefónica, and its price in portability ranged from zero (yes, mobile phones were still given away at that time) and 200 euros.
From today's point of view, the HTC Dream had a highly debatable design, with a physical keyboard that seemed to demonstrate the Taiwanese company's fear of virtual keyboards embedded in displays. But it is understandable, since we are talking about a time when headlines were circulating in the newspapers such as " Nokia enters the tactile era without excessive conviction " or " Google will allow payment applications for Android ". We were all younger, less experienced in the world of mobile telephony and, in short, completely ignorant of what the Android operating system would mean in a matter of a few years.
Between the blows of the falls of large US banks and sales of the iPhone that broke all records and to have, HTC made its way into the mobile phone market in the purest Moses style. HTC Hero over here, HTC Magic over there, Android 1.5 Cupcake in between… Android had entered our lives forever, and who else and who less we were all surprised to see the wiper widget -or, failing that, the effect of raindrops when there was bad weather in our city - which HTC incorporated into its customization layer (HTC Sense). That was how things were done, HTC.
2009, 2010 and 2011 (in the first few months at least) were good years for HTC. Money was pouring in, and the company allowed itself to launch new smartphones such as the HTC Desire (with all its variants of Desire Z, Desire S or Desire X), the HTC Wildfire or the HTC Sensation, to name a few of the launches with which HTC brought the colors out of its competition. But it wouldn't be long until the music stopped playing.
We enter the year 2012, and with it HTC begins to glimpse its fall off the cliff. Mr. Peter Chou, who to this day
HTC's situation at that time was beginning to be a disaster, a disaster in which it was useless that Chou sent an email to his employees with the subject of "We will be back. " " We agreed that we had to do something, but either we didn't do it, or we did it wrong " was one of the most popular phrases in the mail, and many American media summarized it as " we fucked up " (we avoided translating into Spanish). But one thing was right Chou in his controversial email: sales fell as the market HTC smartphones grew.
And, in the middle of this storm, HTC was faced with the challenge of having to launch smartphones that would stand up to the flagships that manufacturers like Samsung were launching under the seal of the Android operating system. The Samsung Galaxy S3 and Samsung Galaxy Note 2 were mass successes in their time and, finding ourselves in the middle of 2013, the Taiwanese company used its latest cartridges to launch the HTC One. It would be unfair to say that the HTC One was not a good smartphone, but by then things at HTC were only going to get worse.. Most of us mortals were on the sidelines of what happened behind the development of the HTC One, but in those days even letters were released in which HTC workers spoke of marathon days of 12 hours of work a day, without overtime payments. Truth or lie, we will never know; what is clear is that at this time HTC was plummeting. In every sense.
And so, controversy after controversy, HTC One M8 and HTC One M9 later, we come to today. The One M9 is an excellent smartphone (we expressed this in our test of the HTC One M9, without forgetting to mention its weakest points), but it conveys the feeling of being slightly out of place in the market. The lack of publicity, the sad role in the overheating problems of the Snapdragon 810 and the extreme competition in the sector are not exactly good allies to carry out a flagship of these characteristics.
Bad luck, black hand, or a rookie steer (in 2011, when money was still flowing gushing into HTC, the Taiwanese company was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on investments ($ 50 million in Saffron Digital, $ 40 million in OnLive, 13 million in Inquisitive Minds, 300 million in Beats Audio…) that had a dubious return (the investment in Beats, at least, left behind one of the best audio systems in the mobile phone market)). For nowHTC returns to the red, and time will tell us if one day we can write the history of the rebirth of this Taiwanese company.
