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HTC’s plan to fix itself: make cheaper phones

It looks like it’s a case of back to the drawing board for HTC as the Taiwanese company admits that it will need to focus on the lucrative mid-tier, R1 500 – R3 500, smartphone market which is currently dominated by the likes of Samsung. Up until now, HTC has concentrated on high end smartphones like last year’s flagship  HTC One and the smaller One Mini. It’s a strategy that has seen HTC’s market share fall from 9.3% in 2011 to less than 2% today with its share price following a similar slump.

According to HTC’s co-founder and chairwoman, Cher Wang, “The problem with us (HTC) last year was we only concentrated on our flagship. We missed a huge chunk of the mid-tier market,”. HTC won’t be targeting the “very, very low-end of the market” but it also won’t be abandoning the high-end smartphones that made its name. Wang said that HTC will be releasing a new flagship device in the near future which could mean a launch at the upcoming Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona at the end of the month.

Last year’s flagship, the HTC One, was one of the best Android devices with an industrial design that was streaks ahead of most of the competition. Unfortunately a combination of manufacturing and distribution issues combined with a series of lawsuits brought forward by Nokia, ensured that competitors like Samsung managed to get devices on shelves and into the hands of competitors long before HTC could.

HTC will once again face an uphill battle in the premium smartphone segment against Samsung, who have proven in the past that it has the ability to launch an advertising campaign that drowns out the competition. However, in the middle segment of the market HTC have an opportunity to carve out a niche that could bring them far more stable income and profits in the future.

[Image: Flickr user learnkids2003]

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