Quote:It would be easy to chalk this up to the company’s failure to innovate, especially since the HTC One M9 is basically a retread of the One M8, which is a retread of the One M7. Look around the Android market, and it’s Apple that captures north of 90% of the device market’s profits. Samsung soaks up the little that’s left, and manufacturers like LG, with its well-received G3 and G4 family, tend to make around 1 cent per phone in net profit. It’s hilarious to think that smartphone profit margins are so terrible that these companies would be envying the likes of Dell or HP, but that’s the market as it currently exists. HTC’s device protection plan might have been awesome, but it clearly hasn’t helped move that many phones.
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The current market isn’t sustainable, and it suggests that the OEMs most likely to remain in the Android market are those that can survive a poor release cycle or product miss by drawing on cash reserves and earnings generated by other sections of the company. Samsung and LG fit that requirement, while a company like HTC doesn’t. Whether we’re going to see a push towards even fewer phone models and better device security, however, remains unclear. Until phone manufacturers make fundamental changes, it’s going to be extremely difficult to make any money off of Android. Even companies like Samsung have seen both profits and sales fall this year, which only furthers the need to take action and cut costs.