Sensational growth
Taiwanese smartphone giant HTC has announced its latest monthly revenue figures, and they revealed year on year revenue growth of over 115 percent.
Furthermore these figures are a continuation of triple figure growth in 2011, and actually represent a relative low water mark, with the first five months of the year showing revenue growth of almost 150 percent.
When HTC announced its first quarter results at the end of April, they revealed new records for both revenue and profit, which almost tripled year-on-year.
"Thanks to the hard work of our employees and support from consumers worldwide, we had a phenomenal quarter with record sales and profits," said CEO Peter Chou at the time. "Our innovation and leadership in technology has taken us to new highs. Our brand has been increasingly recognised by customers, and we will continue to focus on delivering the best smartphone products with cutting edge technology, user friendly interface and premium lifestyle design."
We've seen how explosive the growth of the Android smartphone sector has been - and have to assume 99 percent of HTC sales were on that platform - but there has been concern about how easy it is to make a profit in this very competitive market. One other positive figure for HTC is that the average selling price of its handsets increased 6 percent year-on-year to $359.
This is all Apple-like growth. In early February HTC's share price was NT$300, in the year or so since then it has quadrupled to NT$1,250. This means HTC's market cap is currently at around a trillion Taiwanese dollars, which translates to around 35 billion US dollars, way ahead of Nokia's current market cap of $25 billion. How times have changed.
