Distributor updates
Who Benefited the Most from the Google/HTC Relationship?
HTC have been one of the biggest success stories in the mobile phone industry over the past couple of years. After securing the lucrative contract to produce the Nexus One, Google’s first Smart Phone, HTC was propelled into the top tier of mobile phone manufacturer’s rankings and through the continued success of their own phones, HTC’s business has grown into one of the Super Powers of the Smart Phone industry. But is there conflict between HTC’s own phones and those being produced for Google? Up until recently the Nexus One was only available through exclusive channels in selected countries and it’s poor sales performance has been attributed to this distribution strategy.
On May 19th, gsmExchange.com reported that a decision had been made to change the distribution system and introduce a major distributor into the equation. In theory, this should have changed the fortunes of the Nexus One but new figures produced today reveal that trading on the open market is still poor for the Nexus One while the demand for Google’s closest rival in terms of operating system and design, the HTC Desire has exploded with supply running at only 56% of the current demand. Over the past three months of trading, demand for the HTC Desire has forced the unit price up 8.24% to €404.82 an incredible result compared to the Nexus One who barely managed to hold on its price over the same period, with a small increase of 0.4%.
What is interesting is the demand comparison between both models. The results in June have revealed that the Desire’s demand is outstripping requests for the Nexus One by more 300%. Reports from the trading floor suggest that the international trading community has accepted that the Nexus One is too difficult to source and appears to have focused attention on similar models that are more readily available, resulting in the success of the HTC Desire in this area
Overall the HTC range continues to be extremely popular on the open market and it isn’t only the Nexus One that is suffering from this success. Recent reports from HTC have highlighted the overall growth of their market share which has to have impacted Blackberry and Nokia’s results.