HTC’s August 2013 numbers are out, and they’re pretty bad, but you were expecting that

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 4 Sep 2013

HTC has just published their August 2013 revenue figures. Spoiler alert: They’re bad. They managed to pull in a hair over 442 million USD, which is down over 16% from July and down over 45% from the same month last year. On the day that Samsung and Sony are announcing their new flagship phones, HTC has this.

Why is HTC doing so bad? For one thing, we found out earlier this week that their top design talent planned to leave the company to make their own smartphones. That’s bad. There’s also the whole HTC versus Samsung marketing budget issue. For every dollar HTC spends on advertising, Samsung seems to be spend about one million. I’m exaggerating of course, but you get the idea.

Looking forward, is there anything in HTC’s portfolio that could potentially change the tides? The recently announced HTC Desire 601 is actually quite a decent midrange phone, but there’s no price tag, so it’s hard to say how well it’ll compete. Then there’s the 5.9 inch One Max, which is nothing more than a blown up One. That might turn some heads, but the Note III is going to be announced in just a few hours.

I’m hard pressed to find something that can “fix” HTC, can you?