Taiwan’s HTC reported a 45 percent year-on-year decline in sales, triggering share-price losses large enough to trigger the Taipei market’s rules automatically preventing a firm’s stock from falling more than a certain amount in a given day. But as seen above, to understand the rise and fall of HTC, it’s helpful to gain a multiyear perspective.
Basically they rocketed up the international mobile phone vendor league tables on the back of Android’s early growth, but now they’re having their lunch eaten by a mixture of Samsung on the high-end and off-brand Chinese vendors on the low end. The Android OS is a huge success in terms of market share, but it’s been a very treacherous business proposition. Only Samsung is really making it work right now. HTC was making it work at one point, but then it all vanished with frightening speed.
