In a press briefing, Mark Dewey Sergio, HTC country manager for the Philippines, said that they have chosen Smart to take advantage its widest network and further grow its market share in the smartphone arena.
The partnership signals a more aggressive and concerted move from the two industry leader to continue driving the Philippine smartphone revolution in a worldwide market estimated to grow 55 percent year on year in 2011.
Currently, the Smartphone market share in the country is about 20 percent of the total mobile phone users and the number is expected to triple in the coming years.
Sergio said that of the total market share locally, HTC corners 15 percent.
Sergio said they intend to further grow this with its partnership in Smart.
After being so called text capital of world with over 1 billion SMS sent daily, the Philippines is now also considered as social networking capital of the world being among the top users of Facebook globally.
This signals a growth potential for Smart and HTC.
However, Gio Bacareza, Smart head for Broadband, Internet and Data Services said that aside from offering smartphone devices they will also be announcing more affordable mobile internet packages this month to hook more subscribers to user internet via mobile phone.
To date, Smart’s cheapest mobile internet package is P10 for 30 minutes and P50 unlimited internet a day, P 100 for unlimited internet for 3 days then P1200 unlimited for one month.
To further address the high demand for bandwidth and to provide better broadband services, Bacareza said that they continue to strengthen their 3G network, and HSPA network which has expanded in 144 sites and also its LTE technology which they will be launching very soon.
Aside from the 3G enabled phones, he added that Smart will also be launching a 4G enabled mobile phone devices using the LTE network this quarter.
Of the total 46.6 million subscribers of Smart in the first quarter this year, about 4 percent to 5 percent are using smartphone devices including the Nokia Symbian phones.
Recently the telco leader reported a 102 percent jump in the number of smartphone users in its network from February to May 2011, particularly those using handsets that run on Google’s Android operating system (OS).
HTC meanwhile has sold about 9.7 million smarthone worldwide, an increase of 192 percent year on year, a feat it intend to repeat locally.
The HTC official said that among its market globally, Asia is growing very fast compared in the other country’s in the region.
Previously, HTC launched a series of first, including the HTC magic back in 2009 – officially the first Andriod powered device made commercially available in the Philippines and one of the first handsets powered by the updated Gingerbread platform HTC Desire S.
Part of the exclusive partnership of HTC with Smart starting second half this year, Smart subscribers will be able to avail of HTC’s most advanced Andriod devices.
HTC was founded in 1997. Initially a manufacturer of notebook computers, HTC began designing some of the world’s first touch and wireless hand-held devices in 1998.
The company has a rich heritage of many "firsts", including creating the first Microsoft-powered smartphone (2002) and the first Microsoft 3G phone (2005).
Their first major product was made in 2000 and was one of the world’s first touch screen smartphones.
The company’s growth has accelerated dramatically since being chosen by Microsoft as a hardware platform development partner for the Windows Mobile operating system.
On February 17, 2010, Fast Company ranked HTC as the 31st most innovative company in the world.
