Unaudited Q1 results from HTC show 98% decline in net profit

HTC included some preliminary Q1 results in its monthly financial report and the numbers aren’t looking good. After a poor performance in the second half of last year, HTC was hoping the One will help it bounce back up, but difficulties in manufacturing meant that the company had to push back the launch. Only three countries saw the One launch on time.

The net income for HTC in the first quarter was just $2.8 million, a painful 98% drop compared to the year ago quarter. Still, any profit is better than a loss, so it's not all bad. Revenue for Q1 2013 was $1.4 billion, down 37% over the year ago quarter (which saw $470 million in net income).

An analyst from Taipei-based Daiwa Securities says "HTC One’s production shortage means lost sales in the first quarter will be lost forever, not just delayed," but thinks the One will still launch early enough ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S4 launch to give HTC a "good chance" of posting good second quarter results after six consecutive quarters of declining results.

There’s also the Facebook phone – the HTC First – which targets the social network's 1+ billion people with a Facebook-made launcher called Home.

Anyway, these are the early unaudited results. We can expect to see the detailed report later on.

Source (PDF) | Via

Snapdragon 600 based Samsung Galaxy S4 is twice as fast as Galaxy S III and iPhone 5, easily beats HTC One too

Yesterday we got some potentially bad news for Europe – that the Galaxy S4 version in sold in Sweden will use the Snapdragon 600 chipset instead of the Exynos 5 Octa that geeks were hoping for. The same version will be sold in North America. However, then we saw some reassuring benchmarks and now we can add one more.

Primate Labs, makers of the Geekbench app took interest in the Samsung Galaxy S4 performance and made a chart to see how the new Galaxy flagship performs. Using data from a benchmark run by Android Authority, the Primate Labs chart shows that the S4 is over twice as fast as its predecessor.

It also beats the HTC One, which uses the same chipset though at a lower clockspeed (1.7GHz for the HTC, 1.9GHz for the Samsung). As for competition from other platforms, the Apple iPhone 5 scores almost the same as the BlackBerry Z10, both with about half the score of the Galaxy S4.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 used for the benchmark is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, meaning it uses slightly updated Krait 300 cores compared to the BlackBerry Z10 and the LG Nexus 4. Also note that the Galaxy S4 used for the benchmark has not been running finalized software.

As Primate Labs points out, the iPhone 5 will be updated soon and the iPhone 5S will improve performance and we’ll have to wait and see how it stacks up. But the Z10 is it for BlackBerry, their other model coming this year, the Q10, uses a lower-end chipset.

Shame that we don’t have a score for the Galaxy S4 version with an Exynos 5 Octa – the Cortex-A15 cores are supposed to blow the Kraits out of the water, battery willing.

Source | Via