Although the HTC One impressed a lot of techies with its features, the sales record of the Taiwanese tech firm is definitely not impressive because its profit plummeted 83 per cent to $41.63 million based on total revenues of $2.35 billion in the second quarter of 2013.

For the same quarter in 2012, HTC enjoyed a profit of $7.4 billion. The slump in profit is because of declining sales in the U.S. and Europe, although the company is enjoying good sales in China. Competition from low-cost smartphones in Asia caused the HTC One sales to be lower than expected, while the Facebook phone failed to take off.

To worsen the state of affairs in HTC, its executives are resigning left and right or opening rival tech companies.

To address the problems besetting the Taiwanese tech firm, HTC Chief Executive Peter Chou said its focus is to get new products into the market, and it will increase to twice the current level the marketing budget of the company in 2014 to boost its profile versus Apple, Samsung and other bigger rivals.

However, one word of comfort for HTC is that it is not alone in the cellar. "The whole high-end smartphone industry is slowing, which is not just an HTC problem ... It's a saturated market," The Wall Street Journal quoted Barclays analyst Dale Gai.

Despite its effort to boost market share by rolling out fewer, higher-quality phones, HTC failed to improve its sales that in the fourth quarter of 2012, it had slipped behind Chinese phonemakers ZTE and Huawei from being the fourth-largest smartphone producer at the start of 2012.

RELATED STORIES