HTC Might Say Goodbye To The Indian Market

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With their sales dipping year after year, HTC might just call it quits in the Indian market. The company has been facing a bit of trouble across its global markets and are struggling to keep their sales figures up as well. In a recent report by the Economic Times, the resignation of Country Head Faisal Siddiqui, Sales Head Vijay Balachandran and Product Head R Nayyar has left the Indian arm of the company in dire straits. In a stunning move, the company has asked around 70 to 80 of its Indian employees to leave the company with only Chief Financial Officer Rajeev Tayal staying behind after the three key members’ resignation. Although the company could halt all Indian operations soon, they are still pushing forward with their Virtual Reality division which will be overseen and controlled by the Taiwanese branch of the company.

HTC Dream

Looking back at the company’s storied history, the HTC Dream was the first commercially sold Android phone back in September 2008. Since then, the company has been rather competitive in global markets. However, in recent years, the company has not been able to keep up with the pace at which other manufacturers are adding innovations to their smartphones. Despite launching a flagship like the HTC U11+, the company has not been able to do well in the markets. The device runs on the Snapdragon 845 with the Adreno 630 GPU. In its early years, the company launched the Nexus One in association with Google which did really well in the market. The company then released the HTC One (M7) which had one of the best cameras of its time. Despite having only a 4MP rear-facing camera, the smartphone could take professional looking shots. Its metallic design gave the phone a very unique look and it also had BoomSound front-firing stereo speakers. This was one of the major selling points of the smartphone since these speakers were the best sounding ones of their time. Arguably, the BoomSound speakers could still outperform speakers of many 2017 and even 2018 flagship smartphones.

Must Read: Unboxing The HTC U11+

HTC Nexus One

This move means that the company will stop selling its smartphones through offline retailers. The company still plans to use online shopping portals like Flipkart to sell its smartphones in India. They also acknowledge the fact that India is one of the most crucial markets for a smartphone manufacturer. This could mean that the company still hasn’t completely given up on the Indian market as yet.

HTC One (M7)

With its offline retail shut down, HTC may face some dispute by retailers. The major retailers of the company’s smartphones in India are the Optiemus Group, MPS Telecom, and Link Telecom. HTC owes debts in several crores to some of these retailers.

The future for HTC looks bleak at this point in time. While the company has plans to keep on selling its smartphones, it will have to bring about some major changes in its business strategies to survive the competition.