HTC chairwoman and chief executive officer Cher Wang and her management team bowed to apologize for the company’s bad performance at a shareholders’ meeting in Taoyuan yesterday. "I understand that an apology would not solve the issues, but I hope the shareholders have faith in HTC, as we have built a solid foundation for success through our efforts in VR [virtual reality] business in the past year,"Wang said.

The company reported a net loss of NT$15.53 billion (US$477.85 million) for last year.

Wang said it is not difficult to make HTC’s VR business profitable, but the company has to seek strategic partners and invest more in contents and platforms in a bid to build a VR ecosystem and secure a leading position in the emerging market.

She said the company in April launched a US$100 million accelerator program for VR start-ups in Taipei, Beijing and San Francisco.

HTC plans to expand the program to speed up the technology’s development and increase contents for its VR headset Vive, she added.

In response to shareholders’ concerns regarding HTC’s troubled smartphone business, Chang Chia-lin, head of HTC’s global sales division, said the sales performance of this year’s flagship model M10 is much better than the last year’s M9.

Chang said sales of M9 last year were much lower than the company’s expectations, causing problems and dragging HTC’s overall performance from the second quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year.

M10 has generated profits at retail channels since it was launched at the beginning of this quarter, Chang added.