Facebook Home Flagship Phone, HTC First, May Be Discontinued 192
zacharye writes "The HTC First, or 'Facebook phone' as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn't a good sign when AT&T dropped the price of HTC's First to $0.99 just one month after its debut, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook's little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone. Our source at AT&T has confirmed that the HTC First, which is the first smartphone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed, will soon be discontinued and unsold inventory will be returned to HTC. How much unsold inventory is there? We don’t have an exact figure, but things aren’t looking good. According to our source, AT&T sold fewer than 15,000 units nationwide through last week when the phone’s price was slashed to $0.99."
Re:The light is on but nobody's home (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The light is on but nobody's home (Score:2, Informative)
**T-Mobile** Dash
That's where HTC went wrong. I had 3 HTC phone, and I was happy with all 3. All of them were branded as T-Mobile phones.
I'm sure most HTC phone owners have no idea who HTC is.
Re:Blame HTC (Score:5, Informative)
The phone is actually very good. The hardware that is. If you stripped out Facebook Home you would basically have stock android on it. At .99 cents on contract thats a damn good buy if Cyanogen Mod supported it.
Re:Facebook better learn... (Score:2, Informative)
If high school bullshit found you on Facebook, that is kind of your problem for friending it (and then not un-friending it) in the first place.
Re:Does anybody know? (Score:5, Informative)
Is it normal for the carrier to not outright buy the phone until they sell it?
I don't know about phones, but in the distribution world, it is very common for a reseller to not actually buy a product before it is sold.
Many companies these days work on a virtual inventory basis with their primary supply chain. The basic idea is that the seller of the product effectively leases space in the warehouse to the supplier with a contract such that the supplier agrees to maintain a certain amount of virtual inventory. When the seller sells-through a product, they don't actually have to pay for the inventory until the second the unit is "pulled" from this hub and then the supplier bills the seller and is on the hook to replenish this inventory. Of course the seller discontinues that product, then it just never pulls any more units from hub and the supplier is left holding the bag (even though the inventory is in the seller's warehouse). On the sale, the seller often still has "net-90" days to pay for it as well. As you can see, the life of the supplier isn't easy, nowdays they need to pay for both the inventory and the account receivables side...
For the inventory on the shelf there is a similar paradigm, as part of the shelf stocking agreement, a repurchase agreement is made that the seller can require the supplier to purchase back some or all of the inventory (although usually at a discounted rate), if the inventory hasn't been sold in a certain number of days. This type of stock/repurchase agreements happens in industries far and wide, supermarkets to bookseller to electronic's retailers.
The rationale for the seller offering a high repurchase price and percentages is for the seller and supplier to maximise the amount of product on the shelves (to prevent out-of-stock sales loss) given the seller's risk tolerance for the product. Of course the supplier may be irrational, but the seller is covered a bit in this case... Usually the seller says I'll risk $X to stock your product on the shelf and the agreement is structured by the supplier that although $Y of inventory is stocked, $Y - #units X repurchase_price = $X.