HTC Says Goodbye to the Indian smartphone market: Closes smartphone operation

RIP HTC India smartphone branch. It looks like HTC is stepping outside the Indian smartphone space. According to a report from the Economic Times, the company is closing the smartphone operations in India. Most of the senior management in the HTC India team have already resigned to their posts including the country head Faisal Siddiqui Head HTC India, Sales Head Vijay Balachandran and Product Head R Nayyar have already resigned from their duties.

In fact, several other employees are also asked to leave the company as the brand is ending all the agreements related to distribution and manufacturing in India. This also could be the reason, as the company did not launch the HTC U12+ in India, which is the latest flagship from the brand for the year 2018 and also the first modern smartphone with an 18:9 aspect ratio display and a dual camera setup with a telephoto lens.

No to smartphones, Yes to VR

According to the ET report, the company will shut all smartphone related things. However, it will continue to serve in the VR field to sell devices like HTC Vive and HTC Vivo Pro, which will be directly handled by the Taiwan management.

However, the company will continue to sell the remaining smartphones in India, until the stock lasts.

What went wrong?

HTC was always ahead when it comes to smartphone technology. However, in the last few years, the company failed to compete against the local manufacturers from India and China. When it comes to pricing, HTC smartphones were priced double than the competition and the company could not cope up with the same. In fact, HTC has less than 1% market share in India, whereas brands like Xiaomi and Samsung still owns a majority of the market share.

Conclusion

HTC was the first smartphone brand to launch a smartphone with Android OS and one of the first modern smartphone to come equipped with a dual camera setup. It looks like HTC has taken a bold step to step out of the market as staying in the market with un-impressive numbers will just incur more loss. Brands like Motorola, Nokia, BlackBerry did leave the country and did make a strong comeback and now struggling to make an impact in the market. Let's hope that the HTC will come back to the Indian market with some solid planning and solid smartphones in the near future. However, one can still buy an HTC smartphone until the stock lasts.