Last year when HTC had announced that they were buying 50 % of stakes in Beats Audio, we were quite excited as we expected to see HTC bring some great audio to its devices along with those Beats headsets to which we are quite infatuated. At the start our expectations were fulfilled to some extent with HTC bundling Beats headsets along with some integration on the software part but recently with the One range of its smartphones it decided to not bundle those great headsets although they brought deeper integration plus the ability of third party apps to use the Beats equalizer module.
HTC has been having a rough time recently with sales tumbling, net profit declining for the last three quarters and now Beats decided to buy back 25 % of HTC’s stakes in the company although HTC will continue to exclusively use Beats Audio. According to HTC, the readjustment of shares is aimed at giving Beats more freedom to expand globally.
