HTC disappoints: 'we dropped the ball'

Mobile-phone maker HTC reported fourth-quarter results and first-quarter forecasts far short of analyst projections overnight, while the company's CFO admitted that the recent range of 4G/LTE-enabled smartphones isn't quite up to scratch.

The company, which rose to prominence through its early success in carrying Google's Android operating system to market, said that its fourth-quarter revenue was 102.4 billion Taiwanese dollars, or $3.22 billion, with earnings per share of 13.06 Taiwanese dollars, or 41 cents per share. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected revenue of 144.6 Taiwanese dollars, and EPS of 17.63 Taiwanese dollars.

In the same quarter a year earlier, HTC reported EPS of 17.06 Taiwanese dollars on revenue of 104.0 billion Taiwanese dollars.

The company attributed the significant decline in profit margin to a lull as the company moves to new products.

"Despite temporary weakness resulting from product-cycle transition, HTC believes that it has the ability to create a new wave of momentum through the upcoming product cycle," the company said in a statement. "These margins are a temporary phenomenon, and will normalise when product-cycle transition is over."

HTC's chief financial officer Winston Yung reportedly said on the results call that the company "dropped the ball" on its recent range of 4G/LTE-enabled devices, saying that they are too thick and too battery intensive. Yung added that the company's range of Q4 devices "are not selling as well as we expected".

Australia recently got its first dose of HTC's LTE-powered handsets, with the HTC Velocity 4G released on the Telstra LTE network last month.

A host of new HTC phones are expected to debut later this month at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in Barcelona.

More bad news came in HTC's first-quarter forecast of revenue between 65 billion and 70 billion Taiwanese dollars. Analysts on average were expecting a forecast of 89.6 billion Taiwanese dollars.

Luke Hopewell also contributed to this report.

Via CNET