HTC: only 6-7 highly profitable smartphones are planned for 2017

During HTC’s quarterly earnings call, Chia-Lin Chang, President of HTC’s Smartphone and Connected Devices Business, revealed that the company’s focus for 2017 will not be to increase revenue. Instead, HTC will be focusing its efforts on releasing 6 to 7 highly profitable smartphones which will allow the company to return to profitability.

This means that HTC still has 4 or 5 smartphones in the pipeline for the year as the HTC U Ultra and HTC U Play were unveiled at the company’s headquarters in Taipei in mid-January.

“I think we want to do something — there is some slight difference between 2017 and 2016. 2017, we are looking for profitable sales of products, so we are going to get out of the entry level part which I think is ultra competitive and we are not necessarily going to benefit from a profitability
perspective here.

So to us, profitability on the smartphone is going to be quite important. What we are doing in 2017 is we are going to continue to reduce our portfolio so the number of key SKU is going to be dramatically reduced from last year. As I said, our intention to do basically [6 to 7] maximum,
obviously you still have a legacy product in sales throughout the coming month in there. But the new introduction, that’s what we aim for.”

Chang later added

“we’re not looking for the volume, we are looking for profitable revenue from the sales of the product perspective.”

Source: HTC