HTC says it will right the ship through new investments, like it said in 2012 and 2017

• HTC announced today that it would make strategic investments in emerging technologies to help right its sinking ship.
• However, on Android Authority alone we found two articles of HTC saying similar things in 2012 and 2017.
• HTC might have plans that will help get it back to better financial standing, but “strategic investments” is probably not going to work.

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It’s no secret that HTC hasn’t been doing so well over the past few years. Seven years ago, the company was the fifth-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and now it doesn’t even crack the top ten.

Today, via Phone Arena, HTC announced that it would be investing in “emerging technologies” going forward, emphasizing that it will be much more cautious with its mobile brands to keep losses to a minimum. With its recent injection of $1.1 billion in cash from Google’s purchase of HTC engineers, it needs to make the money last.

There’s just one little problem here: HTC announced a similar strategy in 2012 and did the same thing again in 2017.

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In 2012 – as the golden age of HTC was just starting to come to a close – the company announced a strategic investment in Magnet Systems, an enterprise software developer. This investment came on the back of a $40 million wash after HTC made a poor investment in a gaming company called OnLive, which folded a short time later.

Not much has come from HTC’s investment in Magnet Systems; I couldn’t find one significant news article about the company later than 2012 when it was seeking all of its funding. Its blog hasn’t been updated in two years.

Similarly, in 2017, HTC announced that it would sell a factory it owned for about $91 million, to help offset its continued losses. It promised to put the money into its “expanding VR business.”

While the HTC Vive line of VR products is definitely noteworthy, it’s kind of ridiculous to think that HTC is still trying to appease investors by saying it’s going to invest even more in the VR branch…again.

I don’t hold stock in HTC, so my hat isn’t in the ring. But if I did, I would want much more concrete plans of what the company is going to do to stop its bleeding. Because we’ve heard all this “strategic investment” stuff before and the company is still sinking, to the tune of a 55 percent drop in revenue year-over-year.

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from Android Authority https://ift.tt/2LtfRn0