Taiwan's HTC posts third quarterly profit in a row

Taiwan smartphone giant HTC on January 06 posted a third successive quarterly profit as the launch of a series of new products gave a lift to the resurgent brand. The firm said net profit came in at Tw$470 million ($14.7 million) in October-December, up 51.6 percent year-on-year. However, that is still down from the Tw$640 million profit in the previous three months.
Revenue rose 14.1 percent to Tw$47.87 billion, the first growth in three years, according to Bloomberg News, boosted by the launch of mid-tier handsets mainly targeting China and other emerging markets. The firm had forecast 12 percent growth.
In October HTC launched an array of new products and services, including the Desire Eye smartphone, the social video-editing application Zoe and its first camera, called RE.
In the same month, it partnered with Google to unveil the Nexus 9 tablet dubbed "Lollipop" - the world's first tablet to run on Google's latest operating system, Android 5.0.
The company is actively searching for new ways to appeal to customers and find fresh revenue streams with the launch of new products, it said in a statement in October.
In line with the strategy, the company on January 06 unveiled a new mid-range mobile phone at the Las Vegas Consumers Electronics Show.
With the release of the fourth-quarter figures, the company is expected to become profitable in 2014 after a rare loss in 2013.
But analysts have warned it has a long way to go before regaining lost ground to rivals Samsung, Apple and low-cost Chinese rivals such as Lenovo and Huawei.
"A key factor of HTC's profit in the fourth quarter was the significant depreciation of the Taiwan dollar. Otherwise the company might have posted a loss," said Jeff Pu, analyst at the Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting.
He also pointed to the company's relatively low operating profit, which stood at around Tw$180 million for the quarter, and increased competition from Samsung, LG, Sony and Xiaomi which are also targeting mid-tier markets.
"I would say its prospects for the next year are not clear," Pu said.
In the 2013 third quarter, HTC swung to its first net loss since listing in 2002, as it fell out of the world's top 10 vendors. The company has been struggling to increase its foothold in the highly competitive smartphone market.