I guess that old saying, "when it rains it pours," is true for HTC right now. Not only have they been having quite a bit of financial trouble because of losing traction in the Android smartphone market, but now it looks like they will be losing another $40 Million dollars in an investment deal that went bad. What's extra interesting about this news today, is that it reveals something that not too many people knew about. Apparently, HTC didn't just invest heavily into "Beats Audio." They also invested $40 Million dollars into OnLive Gaming, the struggling cloud-based streaming gaming service company. Things aren't going so well for OnLive at the moment, and HTC will end up losing their investment.
The problem is that OnLive can't seem to garner enough interest to start generating any profit beyond their expensive operating costs. Because of this, they are having to perform a financial restructuring, that was one step shy of bankruptcy. OnLive has now come under new ownership, and because of this restructuring, HTC has effectively thrown away their $40 Million investment. Ouch! That's gotta sting.
Still, HTC has the capability and potential to pull themselves out of this tail-spin. We will just have to see if a future product can bring the company back from the brink.
Source: HTCOneForum via Engadget