HTC built the first Android phone and briefly led America's smartphone market
In late 2011 the biggest smartphone seller in the United States was not Apple or Samsung but HTC, a Taiwanese firm that had started out making laptops for other brands. It had also built the very first Android phone. Within four years its share price had fallen by 90 percent.
The company was started in 1997 by Cher Wang and H. T. Cho as a contract manufacturer of notebook computers. From 1998 it designed some of the earliest touchscreen and wireless handhelds, and in the early 2000s it quietly built Windows Mobile PDAs sold under other names, such as the iPAQ. It began selling under its own name in 2006 and, as one of 34 founders of Google's Open Handset Alliance, released the HTC Dream in 2008, sold by T-Mobile as the G1 and the first phone on the market running Android.
Growth was dramatic. HTC sold more than 24.6 million handsets in 2010, more than double the previous year, overtook Nokia to become the third-largest smartphone maker in April 2011, and that autumn led the US market with 24 percent. Success drew fire: after Steve Jobs vowed to destroy Android, Apple sued HTC over 20 patents in 2010, and the two traded complaints until a ten-year licensing deal in 2012.
The slide was just as fast. Apple and Samsung ate into its sales, and by February 2013 its US share was 9.3%. The acclaimed 2013 HTC One won design awards but sold worse than Samsung's Galaxy S4, and HTC posted its first quarterly loss that October. Microsoft, it later emerged, had considered buying the company that year.
HTC looked for a second act. With Valve it launched the Vive virtual reality headset in 2015 and reported selling at least 140,000 units at a profit by late 2016. It built Google's Pixel phones, and in 2017 Google paid US$1.1 billion for roughly half of HTC's design and research staff plus licences to its patents.
Source: HTC
