HTC disappoints with financial results, forecast
Fourth-quarter profits slipped for the Taiwanese phone maker, and its revenue forecast for the first quarter is well below analyst expectations.
Mobile-phone maker HTC today reported fourth-quarter results and first-quarter forecasts far short of analyst projections.
The company, which rose to prominence through its early success carrying Google's Android operating system to market, said its fourth-quarter revenue was 102.4 billion Taiwanese dollars, or $3.48 billion, with earnings per share of 13.06 Taiwanese dollars, or 44 cents per share. Analsysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected revenue of 144.6 Taiwanese dollars and EPS of 17.63 Taiwanese dollars.
In the year-earlier quarter, 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 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 normalized when product cycle transition is over."
A host of new HTC phones are expected to debut later this month at the Mobile World Congress 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.
