After stories of the VR industry losing mainstream traction started to appear across various media outlets over the past couple of days, Taiwanese electronics giant HTC used its position as an industry leader to tell everyone that the company is experiencing “record sales” despite the narrative suggesting otherwise.
Following a blog entry titled “Think VR is dying? It’s just getting started,” company reps claimed that the recent decline in headset sales (via Amazon) was due to “severe inventory issues”.
As per the post:
“VIVE has paced at its highest sales velocity of all time, for weeks on end, and we sold out. For a consumer electronic product in its third calendar year, this continued trajectory is nearly unheard of.”
While the statement from HTC does not dispute the fact that their sales have declined somewhat, the company maintains that the downturn has been caused because their “production facilities have not been able to keep up with the market demand”.
A more detailed look at the company’s sales figures
As per the blog post, HTC points to the fact that their Vive headset controlled a whopping “35.7 percent of all virtual reality-related revenue in Q1 2018”. In addition to this, the multinational also revealed that their standalone HTC Vive Focus headset, which is currently only available in China, controls 33.1 percent of the nation’s standalone VR sales. Whats more is that its closest rival, Pico, also runs of HTC firmware.
Final Take
Even though the Taiwanese manufacturing leader is trying to brush aside stories which claim that the masses are losing interest in VR tech, the numbers definitely seem to indicate otherwise. Most experts feel that this recent decline of interest might be due to VR hardware not only being quite expensive but also not delivering a level of detail that most people had initially expected.
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