The mobile phone industry is thriving like no other but of course that doesn't exactly guarantee success as a vendor. HTC, Taiwan's largest smartphone maker and one of the hottest brands just a few years ago, is one of several victims in the cutthroat industry as evident by their latest quarterly earnings report.
The struggling company suffered record low levels across the board while simultaneously missing revenue forecasts. For the first quarter ending in March, HTC recorded an unaudited net profit of $2.82 million compared to $33.2 million during the fourth quarter and a whopping $3.63 billion during the same quarter a year ago.
The company was expected to bring in between $1.66 to $1.99 billion in revenue but ultimately ended up earning just $1.42 billion. For reference, HTC collected $2 billion in revenue between October and December 2012.
HTC had an opportunity to go back on the offensive with their impressive HTC One smartphone but a shortage of camera components forced the manufacturer to delay its release in major markets like the US and Europe by about a month.
Unfortunately for HTC, that gave Samsung plenty of time to announce and prep the Galaxy S4 for launch. The HTC One will still be available before the S4 but it'll only beat it to market by a few days - not a significant amount of time by any stretch of the imagination. Considering the massive momentum train that Samsung is riding at the moment, it'd be pretty shocking if HTC was able to derail it.