Taiwan’s HTC, the world’s fourth largest smartphone maker, recorded its lowest quarterly profit since it began reporting publicly in 2004. During the first quarter HTC earned $2.85 million (T$85 million), less than 10% of what it earned in the year-ago quarter.
A shortage of cameras for its new HTC One phone meant that the company could not release that phone into as many markets as planned during the first quarter. The HTC One’s ultrapixel camera is touted as a breakthrough product that lets in three times as much light as other cameras. It’s just a four megapixel camera, but each pixel is larger than a standard pixel.
Analysts say the HTC One is the key to the company’s future, and will potentially have a much bigger impact on sales than the HTC First, the phone which the company is releasing this month with AT&T to showcase Facebook Home. But because of the delays, the HTC One will hit the market at the same time as Samsung’s Galaxy S4. In the United States, HTC agreed to give AT&T exclusive rights to the 16GB version of the phone, which means that the high-end HTC One won’t even be available to customers of other U.S. carriers this spring.
HTC has already lost considerable market share. Although it was the fourth largest global smartphone vendor last year (after Samsung, Apple and Nokia), it did not make IDC’s top five list during the fourth quarter, and Gartner reported that HTC was number 10 for the fourth quarter.
Huawei, meanwhile, is increasingly smartphone sales worldwide, and other parts of its business are also booming. This week the Chinese firm said it sold 32 million smartphones in 2012, or about half a million less than both HTC (32.6 million) and BlackBerry (32.5 million).
Huawei earned $2.5 billion (15.4 billion yuan) last year on revenue of $35.5 billion ($220.2 billion). Almost three quarters of Huawei’s sales came from its telecom segment, with almost half of that amount coming from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Huawei has been working hard to expand its telecom equipment business in the United States, but American operators face considerable political pressure to avoid working with the Chinese vendor because of security concerns.
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