HTC sees gloomy year for mobe sales

The Taiwanese cellphone mega-manufacturer has cut its immediate revenue forecasts by as much as a quarter, citing continuing global recession and competition from Apple and Samsung. It expects it’s fourth quarter revenues to be $3.4 billion – the same as this time last year.

“Due to global macroeconomic downturn and market competition, the assumptions of 2011 Q4 financial forecast provided earlier are no longer applicable,” HTC said. Growth will return in the first half of next year, it said.

HTC has also been involved in a protracted patent skirmish with Apple, including a recent loss in the US courts over patents on graphics technology held by S3 Graphics, a company that HTC was intending to acquire.

Analysts reacted strongly. Quoted in Bloomberg, Bonnie Chang at Yuanta Securities Co. in Taipei (which has moved HTC to ‘hold’), said: “Wow, it finally happened, the sales growth streak has come to an end. HTC doesn’t have the same sparkle, lacking both the design and marketing of Samsung, while they’ve declined to go into the low-end phones which are popular in China.”