HTC ‘firing on all cylinders’ to reverse financial slump

Year-on-year profits down by 91.5 per cent in Q1, but Q2 expected to show improvements

HTC says it is now “firing on all cylinders” to help drive sales and boost its brand awareness.

The comments were made by HTC CEO Peter Chou (pictured), who was speaking as the manufacturer’s financial woes reached a new low, with profits dipping by 91.5 per cent year on year.

                                          

But Chou, who was addressing the media from the company’s headquarters in Taiwan, said recent efforts to improve its marketing strategy will be key to turning its fortunes around.

In January, Chou blamed HTC’s 90 per cent decline in quarterly profits on a “lack of marketing” of its brand and products.

The company appointed Benjamin Ho as its chief marketing officer to lead a project called ‘Marketing 2.0’, refocusing HTC’s efforts around holistic marketing and mass-market brand outreach.

Chou revealed in those three months, digital marketing spend increased by 250 per cent, and there was a 100 per cent increase in traditional media marketing, focused predominantly on driving sales of the HTC One.

The device is said to have broken all previous records on pre-orders, and UK and EMEA head Philip Blair suggested last month it is on track to become HTC’s fastest-selling handset of all time, branding it “the world’s best smartphone”.

Ho also took the decision to retire its ‘quietly brilliant’ slogan after a decade.

Strong momentum

Chou said: “We are going to run a very successful campaign on the marketing side and on the sales side. So we are firing on all cylinders.

“We expect this to be a very crucial quarter, coming out strong with momentum sustaining until the third quarter.

“Brand awareness is so important for us given a lot of suppliers are coming out strong and there is no differentiation in the market. That’s why we are extremely focused on getting better brand awareness. We are doing this through design innovation of the HTC One.

“And, of course, we also know that we have to greatly improve our go-to market approach in terms of marketing, in terms of channel. We have made great improvements in terms of HTC marketing and execution.

“This is probably the first time HTC has developed an HTC brand, and we are able to really integrate the brand, product and marketing execution all together at one time.”

HTC chief financial officer Chia-Lin Chang added: “We have improved a lot. We have a very good marketing strategy as well as execution strategy to support our HTC One launch. We are pretty confident this marketing campaign will propel us to the next level.

“It’s very important once you start launching the product, to have strong momentum coming out of the gate and to sustain that. So, we believe our spending has been optimal to support sales momentum.”

Android@Mobile World Congress: It’s all about the ecosystem.

Each and every day, we are humbled by the trajectory of Android and our partners.

With a year-on-year growth rate of more than 250%, 850,000 new Android devices are activated each day, jetting the total number of Android devices around the world past 300 million. These numbers are a testament to the break-neck speed of innovation that defines the Android ecosystem.

Last year at Mobile World Congress (MWC), we announced that there were more than 150,000 apps in Android Market. That number tripled to more than 450,000 apps today, with over one billion app downloads happening every month. Think about the astonishing number of songs Shazam’ed, places Qype’ed and foursquare mayorships! To celebrate the hard work and success of our developer community, we’ve built special “app pods” into our Android stand at MWC. Many of these featured apps demonstrate the latest Android innovations, such as Android Beam, which lets you share content like web pages, videos, directions, and apps—just by touching two Android phones back to back.

The Android Stand on the eve of Mobile World Congress 2012

If you walk around the Android stand, it’s also evident that our hardware partners are thriving. There are 100+ devices on display at the conveyor belt bar, which is just a small portion of the 800+ Android devices that have launched to date. And what better sign of innovation than the Bling Bot—powered by the >Android ADK—which can bedazzle your Galaxy Nexus backplate with perfect precision.

We’re just getting started at Mobile World Congress, so keep checkingandroid.com/mwc and the +Android page on Google+ for updates.

iOS Platform Of Choice For Shoppers, All But Biggest Companies Focus On iOS And Android

     

Apple retains the top spot when it comes for uses making actual purchases on their mobile devices, according to a new Forrester report. iOS shoppers are around 30 percent more likely to make a purchase on their device, and about 15 percent more likely to do product research on their smartphones and tablets than Android users, the survey of 58,000 U.S. respondents found.

But despite the discrepancy, companies are still targeting both platforms en masse. The survey also found that 99 percent of ebusiness professionals surveyed during the study intended to launch either a native or hybrid iOS app by the end of 2013, and 96 percent were also targeting the same for Android. Beyond Goole and Apple, however, there’s a very steep drop off in interest, and only larger companies with big budgets are really looking further afield at companies and platforms like BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

That’s because around 41 percent of ebusiness pros have only $500,000 or less to spend on their mobile budgets, and 56 percent have less than $1 million. That money can only go so far, and still pales in comparison to general marketing budgets, and even budgets devoted to general web-facing property. This alone is a prime reason why cross-platform solutions will continue to succeed, even as developers debate the merits of cross-platform technologies like HTML5 vs. native tools.

And while the market appears unified between Apple and Google, that actually belies a fair amount of fragmentation that occupies sufficient developer time and resources within those two larger camps, Forrester points out. Developing for either iOS or Android is a much more resource-intensive affair than it once was, despite efforts made by both companies to encourage users to upgrade and to make it easier to build software compatible across OS versions and device particulars.

In some ways, fragmentation is actually a boon to both Apple and Google in terms of helping them maintain their platform advantage. The more resources developers have to devote to catering to those top two platforms, the fewer they have available to spread out on a third or fourth horse, to the continued detriment of smaller players like BlackBerry and Microsoft. It’s easy to paint fragmentation as a problem, and in terms of developer time and spend, it definitely is, but holding on to the market lead may be an unintended consequence for the mobile top dogs.