HTC has disintegrated sales of its smartphones from major Chinese e-commerce stores after being edged out by new domestic smartphone producers in the market, as reported by South China Morning Post, May 13, 2019.
Long-Term Business Strategy
The Taiwanese electronics firm HTC that designed the first-ever Android phone in 2008, is currently struggling to hold on to its market. In 2018, it also cropped out a quarter of its workforce.
The company has further been faced with ill fate as the domestic smartphone producers in China such as Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi outcompeted HTC. Realizing the lack of demand in the market, HTC has now removed its smartphone sales from leading online shopping platforms such as JD.com and Tmall, a B2C platform of Alibaba Group Holding. HTC will still allow Chinese consumers to buy its phones from HTC’s exclusive online sales platform and its HTC Vive Flagship Store in Shenzhen.
Describing their decision, the official statement read:
“Due to consideration of HTC China’s long-term business strategy, we will temporarily close the HTC flagship mobile phone stores on JD.com and Tmall,”
Not just China, reports suggest that HTC has even been pushed out of the top 5 smartphone companies in its home country Taiwan. The market is now taken over by Apple, Samsung, Oppo, Asus and Huawei.
Bringing Blockchain to Smartphones
In May 2018, HTC announced its first blockchain-focused smartphone Exodus that was designed to act as a hardware wallet and keep users’ cryptocurrencies safe.
Furthering this bid to blend smartphones with blockchain technology, HTC’s Phil Chen announced a new low-cost version of Exodus, dubbed Exodus 1s. During the Magical Crypto Conference in New York, he said that the EXODUS 1s will be able to act as a full node for the bitcoin network and hence, store all the blockchain’s data on the device itself. It will also provide users with a software development kit for HTC’s crypto wallet Zion Vault.
The 1s, expected to be launched in Q3, will be much cheaper and more accessible as compared to the previous version.
While HTC is making commendable efforts to integrate blockchain to smartphones, it has yet to see them adding up to the sales of HTC.
After being edged out in the smartphone business, HTC is currently focusing on the sale of its VR headsets in the Chinese market, of which it holds a major part in the business.
