It’s no big secret that HTC isn’t really doing all that well, and hasn’t really been doing all that well for a while now. They seem to be on an ever-dropping scale and they can’t really seem to take control of the situation no matter what they try. All they can do now is hope for the best with their newest devices, in their case the best being to put their ever-descent to a halt. In no plausible scenario would they be able to increase profits all that much in just a swift maneuver. Not without some form of divine intervention, anyway.
Now HTC made some bad predictions about their profits in Q4 of last year. Their predictions were slightly smaller than the analyst’s ones and they ended up being right. While here we were thinking that they had reached a new low with the last quarter, they seem to predicting an even lower revenue for the first quarter of this year.
After being one of the big dogs for a while, HTC’s fortune begun declining last year and 2013 doesn’t really seem to improve the situation ( not if you consider the way it started ). The revenue from the first quarter of this year is expected to be between 1.7 billion and 2.0 billion dollars. Compared to that of the previous quarter, there is a slight decline as Q4 had a revenue of 2 billion dollars. Their highest was in Q1 of 2012 when they had 2.2 billion dollars. Analysts ( polled by Thomson Reuters, in this case ) expected a 2.1 billion dollars revenue for Q1 of 2013.
Profits are considered to fall even more as HTC is expecting its gross margin for Q1 to be at 21-23% ( with it being 23% in Q4 of 2012 ). Same thing can be said for the operating margin which will either stagnate at 1% ( like the last quarter ) or fall to 0.5%. Only now does one truly realize why HTC’s CEO seemed so excited when he showed off the HTC M7. They probably hope to make some profit with that, but same could have been said for the last flagship as well, and that didn’t really seem to make that much of a change. If anything, the last one just prolonged things for a bit longer.
