HTC is reluctant.
After a long silence, HTC, the old veteran mobile phone manufacturer, finally returned to the public vision with new products.
Last week, HTC unveiled a new 5G model, the Desire 22 Pro, which sells meta-universe and can be used with HTC's own Vive Flow virtual reality glasses.
It is reported that the machine was officially launched in Taiwan on July 1, priced at NT$11990, equivalent to about 2700 yuan, if you buy a glasses package, it is equivalent to about 5300 yuan.
To the public, the sudden surprise of HTC is like a long-lost encounter. Recalling the pinnacle of its time, it goes back to 2011.
In the past few years, the domestic smartphone market has experienced ups and downs, from Apple, Samsung, and then to Huami OV, each leading the way in this grand territory. However, in this wave of the era of update iteration so fast, HTC has not been able to seize the opportunity to rise again.
We always hear stories of popularity, but sometimes stories of decay are more meaningful.
HTC falling from a height
The HTC mobile phone, which is the memory of a generation's youth, is also a giant that has fallen due to patents.
In 1997, Wang Xuehong, the daughter of Wang Yongqing, known as the "god of management" and "king of Formosa Plastics" in Taiwan, founded HTC and resolutely jumped into the field of mobile phone and tablet electronic parts OEM.
The initial HTC is similar to Foxconn, and the initial business is to provide foundry services for technology companies such as HP and Dell.
The twist occurred in 2000, HTC cooperated with Compaq to produce iPAQ, a handheld computer equipped with the Windows CE system, and the technical strength that precipitated it made it look up like a crane in many foundry companies.
In 2002, Wang Xuehong began to try to make her own brand and launched her first smartphone. However, because there is not much innovation and differentiation, the response of this first mobile phone is mediocre. It wasn't until 2007, when Wang Xuehong was inspired to see apple's first-generation iPhone released, that HTC opened the door to the smartphone era.
A year later, HTC bet on Apple rival Google's Android system and released the first Android-powered G1, becoming Google's first ally in Android.
Borrowing the HTC of Google Dongfeng, he began his most brilliant years.
In 2011, HTC sales reached its peak, with annual shipments of 43 million units ranking second among global smartphone manufacturers, second only to Apple, which occupies 29% of the market share, and pushing Nokia, BlackBerry and other mobile phone manufacturers, and the market value has soared to 33.8 billion yuan.
In those years, HTC issued more than 50 smartphones, and explosive models such as the HTC G7 have sold more than 10 million in 4 months. At that time, HTC could be described as an infinite scenery, which was a factory that HTC and Wang Xuehong had high hopes for. In 2011, at the height of HTC's heyday, the plant in Miaoxin Village, Kangqiao Town, Shanghai, covered an area of about 70.92 million square meters, was costing $32.2 million at the time, and had a monthly production capacity of about 2 million units.
The image comes from Fast Technology
But since then, HTC's fortunes have been abruptly reversed.
A year later, HTC launched a patent war with Apple, but it ended in failure. In the second half of 2011, HTC, as the representative of the Android camp, was sued by Apple for patent infringement, and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) would ban certain models of HTC phones from being sold in the United States. At that time, the scope of the lawsuit reached 20 patents, including mobile UI, underlying architecture and hardware design.
After a series of patent lawsuits against HTC by Apple, HTC has been seriously injured and devastated since then. HTC, which has declined so far, must be necessarily related to its products.
Subsequently, in the years from 2012 to 2014, HTC was hit. For example, HTC's flagship product, the One series, has many problems with NVIDIA chips, and it has failed miserably in the same year to release competitors Samsung S3 and iPhone 4S; The launch of a high-end mobile phone M7, the main concept of 400w pixel camera used to emulate Apple, but the yield rate of the problem, also inferior to the competitors 4S and iPhone 5; and HTC M8, because of the lack of innovation but high price, was cooled by the market.
Even the HTC ONE X, which was initially pinned on high hopes, also declined, and then withdrew from the South Korean and South American markets, and the market share was greatly reduced. In 2017, HTC had less than 1% of the market share.
It was HTC's hardest time.
March 2017 was HTC's most depressed spring. People go to empty factories, dusty canteens, small restaurants that are not visited by anyone around, empty shuttles... A depressed and bleak scene throughout the year was documented by journalists from many media outlets.
In the end, HTC sold its manufacturing plant in Shanghai for 630 million yuan and stepped down from the altar.
Time has passed, and it is not easy to return
After years of absence, HTC is faced with a world that has long been in a state of flux.
Since 2017, HTC sold its mobile phone business to Google for $1.1 billion, it has stopped worrying too much about the mobile phone business and shifted its focus to VR.
But in the following years, Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO, vivo and other brands have risen strongly, both hardware and software have ushered in rapid iteration and qualitative leaps, firmly occupied the middle and low-end markets, and began to make efforts to the high-end market.
It can be said that HTC missed the era of golden development of smartphones.
In 2016, the number of global smartphone users exceeded 2 billion, of which China exceeded 600 million, becoming the world's largest smartphone market. In that year, Huawei's smartphone sales exceeded 100 million, ranking the forefront of the world.
Two years later, when Huawei's P20 series of press conferences ended, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business, said that there were only 3 global mobile phone manufacturers left: Apple, Samsung, and Huawei. This year will be a reshuffle period in the Chinese market, and there will be fewer players in the future.
For HTC, whose smartphone business has fallen to the altar, it is extremely difficult to return. It missed the era of player configuration competition.
At the beginning, HTC was positioned as a high-end mobile phone, which meant competing with Apple and Samsung. But in fact, HTC has not formed a brand appeal like Apple and Samsung in the high-end market, and it also lacks a solid product layout in the low-end market.
With the fierce competition in the domestic smartphone market, the market space left for waist brands such as HTC has long been left.
According to the latest report of data agency Canalys, in the third quarter of 2021, vivo, OPPO, Honor, Xiaomi and Apple were the top five brands in the market share of Chinese mainland smartphones, with a combined market share of more than 87%.
With less than 13% of the market share, it's shared by all other phone brands and doesn't leave HTC with too wide a gap.
At the end of last year, HTC's mobile phone business completely withdrew from the mainland market, and the official website of the Chinese mainland has no mobile phones to sell, which made many netizens sigh that the former first machine emperor officially bid farewell.
Hype or wild hope?
People did not expect that after a winter, the story would have a new direction.
H2022 Q1 financial report shows that HTC's revenue has not actually increased significantly, and even compared with the total revenue of NT$1.18 billion in the same period last year, there is a contraction.
Anxious, HTC returned with a special ticket. The giant ship full of capital imagination is called the metacosm.
On that huge boat, there were many passengers. Many technology giants have joined the meta-universe and began to do layout. Looking at China, Tencent has invested in many companies involved in VR games and developed its own AI chip Zixiao; Alibaba set up XR Labs to explore technologies in AR, VR and metacosm, while ByteDance acquired Pico, a leading manufacturer in the VR industry.
In a market tracking report released by IDC, the global shipment of VR/AR headset devices reached 11.23 million units in 2021, breaking through the industry inflection point of tens of millions of units shipped annually. But it is worth mentioning that in the tens of millions of shipments, Oculus occupies the head advantage, with a share of up to 80%; HTC, which has a market share of less than 2%, has been classified as "other".
Therefore, as a mobile phone that has been left behind for many years, it suddenly appears in front of the public with cutting-edge surprises, and HTC, which wants to catch up with the trend of the EAST WIND of the VR meta-universe, can it really harvest the hearts of consumers?
Let's see the products.
In the official introduction, the biggest selling point of this new machine is that HTC Desire 22 Pro has built-in Viverse App with meta-universe entrance, established avatar avatar and VIVE Wallet for managing virtual assets, etc. Users can store their assets in VIVE Wallet at this stage.
This time, the new HTC machine is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 processor, with a front 32-megapixel camera, a rear 64-megapixel main camera + a 13-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera + a 5-megapixel depth of field camera. In addition, the machine has a built-in 4520mAh battery, supports 15W wireless charging, pre-installed Android 12 operating system, equipped with 8GB of memory, 128GB of storage.
Therefore, from the perspective of various dimensions of mobile phones, it is difficult for users to pay for a VR meta-universe mobile phone with such a configuration.
"At this price, I can completely buy Xiaomi and other domestic mobile phones with high configuration, and the design of this HTC Desire 22 Pro: forehead, chin width to like a century back to the back of the century," said Xiao Bao, an "intestinal powder" who entered the pit in the early years.
In addition, the person in charge of the e-commerce technology concept todayiao told Future Observation that although the concept of VR meta-universe is very popular, it still needs to return to the essence when it is applied to mobile phones.
Today's consumer demand for the performance of mobile phones is far greater than the VR meta-universe, and the VR meta-universe mobile phone launched by HTC is not particularly prominent in configuration, so HTC this VR meta-universe mobile phone, consumers may not be willing to pay.
Indeed, VR/AR, as a key device in the metaverse, is one of the development directions for many new entrants to the metaverse. But what cannot be ignored is that the so-called "first year of VR" has risen in only two years. The most intuitive feeling is that after 2018, the capital market's attention to the VR industry has reached the lowest trough, and the departure of a large number of entrepreneurs, especially the content direction of the start-up team, has made the VR industry quickly enter a cold winter.
For HTC, perhaps it is different from a platform that blindly chases hot spots and makes quick money in the short term. It should be admitted that the keywords of transformation, counterattack, and adherence are not exaggerated to describe the former mobile phone giant, after all, it has been in front of the VR gold mine for several years, and finally can melt the silent iceberg of VR with persistence.
But from a rational point of view, it is not difficult to find that the so-called meta-universe mobile phone is still essentially an ordinary model plus a decentralized APP.
This inevitably makes this return trip unpredictable. Relying on the craze, concept and ambition, can the returning HTC catch up with its former self?