Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Some time ago, Xiao Lei and everyone reviewed the nostalgic mobile phone brands including Jin Li, Tianyu and waveguide. These brands once represented the development trend of mobile phones at that time, but for some reason they were forced to leave the market dismal and become everyone's memories. For example, the waveguide mobile phone we mentioned last time is, to some extent, dragged down by its own high marketing expenses.

In fact, among smartphone brands, there is also one that is very similar to waveguide. At the beginning of its establishment, it was almost synonymous with this category, and at its peak it was the first brand that came to mind when people mentioned Android phones. However, due to the departure from the real use scene of consumers, the brand was quickly overtaken by other companies and sent itself away at a high cost in the "end of stress" stage.

Photo Source: Ray Technology is right, what we are going to talk about today is the representative of the former Android phone: HTC.

The counterattack notes that HTC had to mention a name that only the older generation of players can remember-Dopda. According to the data, Dopda is a brand of mobile communication equipment in Taiwan, which was established in 2002. In the early days, Dorpda mainly produced mobile communication devices for other brands, such as smartphones and PDAs, in the form of contract manufacturing. However, like the standard outcome of every contract factory, Dorpda soon began to develop and launch its own brand products and wanted to start its own business.

So who helped Dorpda build smartphones and brought them into Windows Mobile smartphones? Yes, it's HTC. Before 2006, HTC was actually a contract manufacturer of dopda, producing smartphones under the dopda brand.

Photo Source: Topda, however, over time, HTC also began to decide to launch smartphones under its own brand. Soon, HTC gradually reduced the contract production of Dopda, and put more resources into the R & D and manufacturing of its own brand products. In this complex doll relationship, the former Dorpda was quickly replaced by HTC. But these are just an appetizer for HTC, and the real brand highlight will have to wait until 2008.

In October 2008, 19 months after Jobs released the first-generation iPhone, HTC partnered with carrier T-Mobile to launch a true Android phone, the HTC Dream. Chinese players may be more familiar with its development code name-HTC G1.

Photo Source: why does Michael Oryl emphasize that Dream is the first real Android phone? Because Google wanted to enter the smartphone market before the release of iPhone, after years of research and development, they also came up with a development prototype with Android system.

But unlike what people think, this prototype is a full keyboard design, mainly for keystroke interaction, which is completely different from the perceived Android phone. But iPhone's amazing touch-screen interface made Android engineers realize that touch-screen interaction would be the mainstream in the future, so they gave up the "replica BlackBerry" and eventually brought the epoch-making HTC Dream phone.

After Google's "right hand" ushered in Google's Android smartphone era, the ship HTC and Android can be said to be deeply bundled. At that time, Apple was like a fish in the water in the smartphone market with iPhone, Samsung was still wavering between Android and Tizen, and Nokia was trying to save its final decency with its own Symbian 3. At this point, HTC is the best choice for Android and Google.

In the past few years, HTC has become the spokesman of the Android system, HTC Magic, HTC Hero and other classic mobile phones emerge in endlessly. Then nexus one, manufactured by HTC, once again emphasized the unusual relationship between HTC and Google.

Photo source: Google is naturally a good thing for HTC. After all, becoming a royal brand of Android system can greatly enhance your awareness and equate yourself with Android system in the minds of consumers. But for Google, working with HTC weakens consumers' awareness of the Android system and the Google services behind it to some extent.

In addition, the strong HTC Sense interface has threatened the development of the Android system itself to a certain extent, so when Android 2.3 was released, Google did not choose to continue to cooperate with HTC, but found Samsung, which "abandoned the dark light", and launched the Nexus S mobile phone.

To be fair, Google does have a certain degree of resource tilt in front of HTC and Samsung. However, it is undeniable that HTC, who was born as a contract manufacturer, has never been able to break away from the "machine sea tactics" thinking of the contract factory.

In 2010, smartphones also ushered in the era of a hundred flowers blooming, and of course most of the cakes were taken away by HTC, Apple and Samsung. According to statistics at the time, 24.6 million HTC smartphones were shipped worldwide in 2010, surpassing Apple and BlackBerry in sales in the United States. The following year, HTC sales reached a staggering 43 million, ranking fourth in the global mobile phone market and number one among Android phone manufacturers, with a market capitalization of $33.5 billion. In the same year, Wang Xuehong became the richest man in Taiwan with a fortune of US $6.8 billion.

Photo source: HTC, where HTC has a firm foothold in the smartphone market, has resolutely accelerated product research and development. Compared with Samsung and Apple, which have only a few or even one product a year, HTC has come up with the machine-sea tactics that many mobile phone manufacturers are imitating. In 2011 alone, HTC released nearly 50 products, although most of them are baby phones. But it also includes many classic models such as Incredible S, Sensation, Raider and so on.

For HTC, HTC Sense's iconic home screen flip clock is HTC's brand business card. But for Google, who holds the lifeblood of HTC, HTC, which is too strong, robs the host and the host and takes away the part of Android. HTC wants Android to be its business card, but Google, which is in charge of Android, wants HTC and Samsung brands to become Android's brand business cards.

Under this kind of conflict, HTC has become the best prop for Google to "set an example".

Android phones, which are more suitable for Chinese users, have different opinions about the time when HTC was "abandoned by Google". But in my opinion, the key point of HTC's "falling out of favor" is the cooperation between Android system and local mobile phone brands in mainland China. Or more specifically, Xiaomi's phone was officially launched in 2011.

Many people don't know that MIUI was born earlier than Xiaomi's phone itself: at that time, MIUI was mainly a third-party Android system with more localized services for phones of other brands, such as HTC, Samsung, Moto, and so on.

At this time, HTC can not do without HTC Sense, but too complex HTC Sense actually slows down the running speed of Android phones. You should know that at that time, HTC Sense even used the precious graphics resources in its mobile phone to render and switch screens for its own Widget widgets. This kind of superficial skill was obviously not recognized by Chinese consumers.

Photo source: with the emergence of the first generation of Xiaomi phones, Android phones have officially entered a "two-track" era led by Samsung-led flagship phones and Xiaomi-led performance-to-price flagship phones: Samsung has built the comprehensive standards of flagship phones in the Android camp with Exynos and AMOLED, while Xiaomi is exploring the price floor of Android phones.

HTC? HTC has nothing but HTC Sense.

Although HTC can barely recover the scene with HTC Sense at this time, in the Android camp, other brands have established their own brand characteristics through their own products, such as Samsung is the representative of high-end phones, Moto takes the business route, and Xiaomi plays a cheap and big bowl.

But HTC did not have any cards in his hand, and the confused HTC could not even come up with a powerful counterattack except for aircraft-sea tactics. After learning from the bitter experience, HTC decided to invest a lot of money in brand promotion to let everyone remember the brand HTC and first type the brand image again.

It's a pity that this heavy punch almost killed HTC himself.

In 2013, HTC signed Robert Downey Jr. for a series of "baffling" promotional events with a budget of $1 billion. But it is clear that the technical problems facing HTC cannot be solved by spending money on advertising. As soon as the two-year contract period ended, the marketing campaign, jokingly called "chasing stars at public expense" by Chinese HTC users, faded out of everyone's sight without leaving a trace, and became the last straw to crush HTC.

Source: HTC is facing the changing Android market, HTC has been unable to recover. HTC Sense 7, which pinned all HTC's expectations, was transformed into a so-called "CosOS" and eventually aborted for some complex internal reasons. When Google used Pixel to take away the last legacy of the HTC mobile team, HTC has actually embarked on the end of the brand.

In 2018, HTC's online sales channel was shut down directly. From this time on, HTC also slowly faded out of everyone's sight. In 2022, HTC mobile phones accounted for less than 0.1% of the global mobile phone market, which is even more distressing compared with the original market share of 80%.

Who killed HTC? In fact, the root of HTC can be divided into four aspects. First of all, the HTC product line is highly single, but the technology is relatively weak, thinking of competing with Apple and Samsung for the share of the mid-to-high-end market, but ignoring the low-end market where profits are low but the share is extremely high. Once there is a problem in the middle-and high-end market, overall sales will decline.

Second, apart from the early bundles with Android systems, HTC has never established its own brand image. It is neither as deeply rooted in the hearts of the people as Samsung and Apple, nor as cost-effective as domestic mobile phones. It can be said that the image of HTC mobile phones in the minds of consumers has been very vague for so many years.

Finally, there is the supply chain: Samsung has always provided HTC screens, which means Samsung can influence actual HTC sales at any time by limiting the supply of screens. In fact, Samsung did do this, which led to the chaos of the HTC product line that year.

Photo Source: HTC, but what really sentenced HTC to death is actually HTC's long-standing foundry mentality.

In HTC's short life cycle, it never thought it could improve its revenue and brand image from other industries. Samsung has been developing its own systems and processors and is still a supplier to most mobile phone manufacturers; Apple prides itself on a high degree of unity of hardware and software, and the ultra-high profits brought by iTunes and App Store make hardware manufacturers drool all over the world; and Chinese mobile phone manufacturers take a different approach, surpassing even many traditional established enterprises in smart home.

But HTC has nothing, and from beginning to end, HTC still lives in the fantasy of "building every phone for Google", not realizing that Google has 10, 000 ways to "integrate" HTC's mobile phone team, such as hollowing out the "Pixel plan" of HTC's mobile phone business in a sense.

Contract manufacturers dominate the new battlefield, but it's not fair to say that HTC does nothing except mobile phones. In fact, in 2015, HTC has shifted the focus of the entire company to the VR market, and the vive virtual helmet released in the same year impressed many people with a high degree of completion. After three years of development, the global sales of vive reached 200000 units in 2018. HTC, which has made such an impressive achievement, slowly began to develop the industrial chain of VR.

Since then, for several years in a row, HTC has maintained its leading position in the global VR market with the advantage of exceeding its market share of 1 VR 3, and has successfully entered the position of the top five in the global VR field in 2021. In 2022, HTC's VR-related product shipments have exceeded 65 million sets, which can be regarded as the current leading enterprise in the VR field.

Photo Source: HTC, but can HTC move to VR Raceway rest easy? The answer is no. Leaving aside the threats from peers such as Meta and bytes, the VR industry is in urgent need of an Internet concept that can sustain product marketing, such as meta-universe, because it has been unable to find its own tipping point for years. But just like the original mobile phone business, HTC has not been able to get rid of its "foundry" thinking even in the VR industry, imagining that it can stabilize its pace in the meta-universe market through VR infrastructure.

But when other meta-cosmic enterprises begin to take the initiative to set up the "moat" of the VR industry, who can care about the poor HTC? If HTC does not change and is wiped out by emerging software brands at the moment of the birth of meta-universe, it is likely to be the final outcome of HTC as a "contract manufacturer".

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Lei Technology (ID:leitech), author: Lei Tech Digital 3C Group

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