East Asia is the world's electronics factory, yet unless they are Japanese, producers are largely anonymous. Now HTC Corp., a Taiwanese maker of smart phones, is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple's iPhone.
HTC supplies U.S. carriers Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile but says a year ago only one in 10 Americans knew its name. With the help of marketing by cellular carriers and HTC's own television ads during the baseball World Series, HTC says that number is up to 40 percent.
"We want to be one of the leaders," said John Wang, the 13-year-old company's chief marketing officer.
HTC's path to its own brand has been complicated by U.S. carriers' preference for many years to market its phones under their own brands.
That started to change in 2007, and the "HTC" brand started showing up on phones, as carriers figured that the company had some cachet among early adopters that they could capitalize on. HTC phones on the U.S. market include the Droid Incredible, sold by Verizon Wireless, the HD2, sold by T-Mobile USA, and the Hero, sold by Sprint Nextel Corp.
Even now, HTC is careful to avoid straining ties with carriers by promoting its own identity too aggressively. Such ties are crucial in the United States, Japan and other markets where carriers usually pick which phones to offer. In Europe and elsewhere, customers pick their own phones and buy service separately.
The company's slogan, "Quietly Brilliant," expresses both modesty and pride.
HTC was just behind Apple in the final quarter of 2008, selling 3.7 million phones to its American rival's 4.4 million, according to Wallis-Jones. A year and a half later, Apple has pulled ahead, selling 8.4 million in the second quarter of this year, while HTC sold 5.4 million.
But HTC is seeing its sales jump. It expects to ship 6.5 million phones in the current quarter, more than twice the number it shipped in the same period last year.
News Source: clarionledger.com