HTC

HTC
Information
Type	Public company
Industry	Virtual reality, Consumer electronics
Founded	May 15, 1997
Founder	Cher Wang, H. T. Cho, Peter Chou
Headquarters	Xindian District, New Taipei City, Taiwan
Notable Personnel	Cher Wang (Chairwoman and CEO)
Products	HTC Vive headsets, Viveport, Viverse
Website	https://www.htc.com

HTC Corporation (originally High Tech Computer Corporation) is a Taiwanese consumer electronics company founded in 1997 and headquartered in the Xindian District of New Taipei City. It built one of the first consumer virtual reality systems, the HTC Vive, which it developed with Valve and launched in 2016, and it has since reorganized much of its business around VR and broader XR products under the Vive brand.

HTC was founded on May 15, 1997 by Cher Wang, H. T. Cho, and Peter Chou. It began as an original design manufacturer building handheld computers and, later, smartphones for other brands and mobile carriers, before selling devices under its own name from 2006. The company shipped the first commercial Android phone, the HTC Dream, in 2008 and was briefly the largest smartphone vendor in the United States in 2011. As its phone sales declined, HTC moved into VR, and in 2017 and again in 2025 it transferred large parts of its engineering staff to Google in two separate deals.

HTC is a public company listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange under ticker 2498.

History

Origins and the smartphone era

HTC started as a contract manufacturer, supplying white-label devices that ran Microsoft Windows CE and Windows Mobile to partners and carriers under brands such as Compaq, HP, and Qtek. It began selling products under the HTC name in 2006 and was a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance, the group that backed Google's Android platform. The HTC Dream, sold by T-Mobile in many countries as the T-Mobile G1, reached the market in 2008 as the first phone to run Android. HTC's smartphone business peaked in the third quarter of 2011, when the company held about 24 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, before losing ground to Apple and Samsung over the following years.

Move into virtual reality

HTC unveiled the Vive on March 1, 2015 during its keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, presenting it as a joint effort with the game company Valve. Valve contributed its SteamVR software platform and the Lighthouse laser tracking system, while HTC built the headset hardware; the two companies described the collaboration as a close research and development partnership rather than a strict division of labor. Development kits went out in 2015, and the consumer Vive began pre-orders on February 29, 2016 and shipped on April 5, 2016 at 799 US dollars.

Sale of phone engineering to Google

On September 21, 2017, HTC and Google announced an agreement in which Google paid 1.1 billion US dollars in cash for roughly half of HTC's 4,000-person design and research division, including the team that had built Google's Pixel phones, along with a non-exclusive license to HTC smartphone intellectual property. The deal closed on January 30, 2018. HTC said at the time that it would keep making its own phones and continue the Vive business, though its handset output shrank sharply afterward and the company increasingly described itself as a VR and XR firm.

Recent years and 2025 Google deal

HTC posted operating losses for many consecutive quarters as its consumer hardware sales fell. In January 2025 it announced a second agreement with Google: Google paid 250 million US dollars for a portion of HTC's XR research and development team and a non-exclusive license to certain HTC XR patents. HTC said the arrangement supported its strategy of building the Vive brand, streamlining its product line, and developing its metaverse platform Viverse. The transaction closed at the end of the first quarter of 2025 and helped HTC report a quarterly net profit of about 4.05 billion New Taiwan dollars, ending a 27-quarter run of losses, though the company still recorded an operating loss before the one-time gain.

Vive product line

HTC sells its VR and mixed reality hardware under the Vive brand. The early models used Valve's external Lighthouse base stations for room-scale tracking, while later headsets moved to inside-out tracking and self-contained, standalone designs.

Product	Released	Type	Notes
HTC Vive	April 5, 2016	PC VR, tethered	First consumer model, co-developed with Valve; 2160x1200 total resolution at 90 Hz; ships with two controllers and two Lighthouse base stations; 799 US dollars at launch
Vive Pro	January 8, 2018	PC VR, tethered	Higher-resolution OLED displays at 1440x1600 per eye; later joined by the Vive Pro Eye (2019) with built-in eye tracking
Vive Focus	November 2018	Standalone	First Vive standalone, using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835; Vive Focus Plus (2019) added six-degrees-of-freedom controllers
Vive Cosmos	October 3, 2019	PC VR, tethered	Used inside-out tracking instead of base stations; 699 US dollars; the Cosmos Elite variant (2020) restored Lighthouse tracking
Vive Focus 3	June 2021	Standalone, enterprise	Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 with 2448x2448 per-eye resolution at 90 Hz; sold mainly to businesses
Vive Pro 2	May 11, 2021	PC VR, tethered	2448x2448 per-eye resolution (marketed as 5K), 120 Hz refresh, 120-degree field of view
Vive Flow	October 2021	Mobile, tethered	Compact visor-style glasses for stationary media and meditation, powered by a phone or battery pack; Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1
Vive XR Elite	March 31, 2023	Standalone, mixed reality	Convertible standalone headset announced at CES 2023; Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2, 1920x1920 per eye at 90 Hz, color passthrough for mixed reality; 1,099 US dollars
Vive Focus Vision	October 2024	Standalone, hybrid PC VR	Updated Focus 3 with 16-megapixel color passthrough cameras, automatic IPD adjustment, and DisplayPort PC VR streaming; about 1,000 US dollars

Software and services

HTC runs Viveport, a VR application store that it launched globally on September 30, 2016 in 30 countries with about 60 titles, positioning it for non-gaming VR content such as education, design, and video alongside the games that Vive owners can run through Steam. In 2017 HTC added Viveport Subscription, which it described as the first subscription service for a VR app store, letting members pick a set of titles from a curated library each month.

HTC's broader platform work centers on Viverse, a metaverse and WebXR ecosystem for hosting and sharing 3D worlds across devices, which the company has positioned as the long-term focus of its XR strategy.

Current status

As of 2026 HTC remains an independent public company that concentrates on VR and XR rather than smartphones. Cher Wang serves as chairwoman and chief executive, a role she took on directly in 2015 and again in 2020. The company sells the standalone Vive Focus Vision and Vive XR Elite alongside its enterprise headsets and the Viverse platform, while two staff transfers to Google have left it a much smaller engineering operation than at its smartphone peak.