The Taiwanese smartphone and virtual
The once-powerful smartphone market player, which started life as a manufacturer of other brands’ handsets and now makes the Vive VR headset, has seen sales fall year on year for the best part of half a decade as competition from Chinese and South Korean rivals increased.
The Taiwan Stock Exchange said in a statement: “TWSE announced trading in the shares of HTC Corporation and the securities underlying the company will be halted starting from 21 September 2017 pending the release of material information. The company will apply for resumption of trading after the release of material information.”
Local reports speculate that the “release of material information” could be an impending acquisition by Alphabet. Before the formation of the Alphabet holding company in 2015, Google acquired the mobile phone pioneer Motorola in 2011for $12.5bn (£9.24bn), gaining an important stock of patents in the process. It then sold Motorola to China’s Lenovo in 2014 for $2.9bn without the collection of patents.
