HTC is in an interesting position at the moment. While its flagship smartphone business is sagging, it’s generated a huge amount of interest and hype in its recent virtual reality venture. After partnering with Valve to create the Vive headset and controllers, it’s made a good chunk of change and lead to a new spin off business.
Despite VR successes this year though, it hasn’t proved enough to completely turn the ship around. HTC was banking on the HTC 10, a phone we really liked, doing really well. While it was well received, it struggled to compete with flagship devices from bigger brands like Samsung. The lack of water resistance didn’t help either.
All in all, HTC suffered losses of 1.8 billion New Taiwan dollars ($57 million) for the quarter, raising overall revenue by NT$800 million, or around $25 million. This, it said, was thanks to steady sales of the HTC 10 and continues strong growth from its virtual reality business.
Although HTC hasn’t provided any sales numbers from either hardware line, they could well be getting stronger as time goes on. Although the third quarter still saw overall losses, 2016 is looking to close out strong for HTC. In September revenue rose 31.3 percent year to year and, perhaps more importantly, 42 percent increase from the previous month (thanks AndroidHeadlines).
Also of note is that Google’s recently debuted Pixel and Pixel XL handsets were manufactured by HTC. Although Google is likely to take home the lion’s share of any profits, HTC will enjoy some financial reward for its part in the deal. If its fortunes continue to rise, too, we could see HTC enter 2017 with its books in the black for the first time in a long time.
