[One (M7) General] BarryH_GEG:
The two are very different scenarios. HTC's loss of shareholder value exactly mimics their downwardly spiraling financial performance. And an almost unanimous "sell" rating by analyst means they don't expect them to recover. If they did, with their stock at an all-time low, it would be a great time to buy. Apple's situation is exactly the opposite. While their stock's fallen they've posted some of their best financial performance to date. Apple's issue isn't sales or profit, it's convincing shareholders and analysts that in the face of competition they can continue growing at a pace similar to what they have previously. And investors and analyst's dissatisfaction is why you'll see a June release of an updated iP5 and the possible introduction of a low-cost version. Once those things happen all the paper losses their stock has experienced will be reversed because people will reward their change in strategy. Analysts and investors haven’t lost faith in Apple; they’re just pissed they aren’t doing more to react to Samsung’s challenge.

Just a day after introducing the iPad mini, a revised iMac, a 4th-generation iPad and a retooled Mac mini, the company is outing its

Q4 2012 earnings

-- and it looks as if it has narrowly fell short of Wall Street estimates.

Revenue was $36 billion

(compared to estimates of $35.08 billion), with

net profit at $8.2 billion

. For the sake of comparison, the outfit's

fourth quarter of 2011

saw

$28.27 billion in revenue

alongside

$6.62 billion net profit

-- at the time, those comically large numbers were actually not up to Wall Street's comical expectations.​

Exactly. And if Apple does come out with a low-cost iPhone Samsung's stock is going to crater because Samsung's worst nightmare is an Apple competing across multiple segments of the market and not just the ultra-high-end. Regardless, in Q4 2012 Samsung made $8.27B in profit and Apple $8.2B. HTC's profit for Q4 2012 was $34MM and in Q1 of this year it dropped to $1.85MM. Apple and Samsung's reaction to drops in their stock will be to invest heavily in sales and marketing to sell more current products and spend more on R&D to speed up innovation and get new products to market faster. What's HTC going to do with $36MM in profit that they've earned over the past six months? Buy a couple of TV commercials and print media ads? The fact that it has become public that they are no longer regarded as a "tier-one" supplier is pretty telling and means their component prices will rise and competing for high-demand parts against other companies is going to be harder. With their scale diminishing and free cash flow all but disappeared HTC's options for digging themselves out of their current situation are limited.

Here are Samsung’s sales vs. HTC over the past few years. Samsung expects to sell 10MM SGS4's a month which, with eight months of selling time in 2013 remaining, is 80MM this year. They also expect to sell 350MM mobile devices in total. HTC expected to sell 20MM One's in 2013 before the delay. That means at best HTC hopes to sell 25% of what the SGS4 sells and the SGS4 is only 23% of the mobile devices Samsung expects to sell this year because their product portfolio is so diversified.

Here's Samsung's stock price over the past two years.

Interesting view of the world. Companies need to make money or at least have investors and creditors faith that, if they're in a slump, there's blue sky ahead. "Hanging in there" isn't a strategy it's a by-product of not having one. Ask Kodak, Polaroid, Pontiac, Plymouth, Mercury, the EU car manufacturers (except for VW, M-B, Audi, and BMW), Swissair, Sabena, Olympic, Kingfisher, TWA, Pan Am, and Eastern. There were once 12 major air carriers in the U.S.; through bankruptcies and consolidation now there are four. I'm sure many of the employees at companies that eventually went bankrupt were as chillax'd as you are at one point.

A stagnant company making billions in profit a quarter will have a lot more time to right itself than one that's making $1MM a quarter which is why comparing HTC to Samsung and Apple isn't very productive. And Sony, Motorola, and LG, are divisions of diversified parent companies that have the resources to prop them up during a downturn which HTC doesn't have the luxury of. And the fact that Huawei and ZTE made the top 5 smartphone manufacturers in Q4 2012 should have every other company scared because of their State subsidization and low cost manufacturing and engineering resources. If Samsung’s killing HTC from the top as many of you believe Huawei and ZTE are about to attack them (and others) from the bottom.

I may not know how to code a kernel or, like Hamdir, extract better GPU performance but I do know this crap. ;)