HTC corporation, a company founded in Taiwan, and originally started as a firm that made personal digital assistants for other companies. HTC then transitioned into the fast growing Smartphone category and had emerged as the world’s fourth largest Smartphone manufacturer by 2009. But HTC is now facing big name players such as Nokia, Apple and Samsung Electronics and the competition for high-end sophisticated mobile devices has became more intensifying. CEO Peter Chou is now facing several decisions in order to move his company forward. In this first part, the performance of HTC will be evaluated, looking at the competitive advantages and vulnerabilities. In the second part the operating system strategy will be analysed. Finally, many companies are now offering their own application store, in this part we will analyse whether HTC should build its own app store or do something else.

Performance of HTC and the competitive advantages and vulnerabilities.
Based on the vision of Cher Wang to develop a small, hand-held computer like device, HTC developed its first PDA in 2000. HTC was commissioned to be an original design manufacturer (ODM). In the ODM business HTC manufactured smartphones for branded handset companies. The consequences were that HTC only had little responsibility for sales, marketing, or inventory management. Besides HTC designed phones for service providers such as t-mobile and Vodafone. HTC supported operators by helping them build unique value propositions and optimize their services, this helped them differentiate from other ODMs. and the mobile phone operator business provided better margins. Then HTC started its own brand operations, it started designing phones which would directly be sold with the HTC brand name. They wanted to differentiate itself from competitors and have greater control over the company’s future. They focused on high end