Attendees are playing an immersive game with the HTC Vive virtual reality equipment at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 26, 2024.
Charlie Perez/NurPhoto via Getty Images
HTC, a Taiwanese consumer electronics maker best known for its smartphones, is selling part of its extended reality (XR) business to Google for $250 million.
As part of the transaction, HTC will transfer some of its employees from its XR team to Google, the Taiwan-listed company said in a statement on Thursday. HTC will also grant Google non-exclusive XR intellectual property rights. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, according to HTC.
In a separate statement, Google said the transaction would accelerate the development of its Android XR platform across headsets and smart glasses. It added that HTC’s immersive technology engineers are “an incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space.”
The transaction marks the second major deal between HTC and Google. In 2017, HTC sold part of its smartphone operations to Google for $1.1 billion. The deal at the time involved HTC transferring some of its staff with experience working on Google’s Pixel smartphones to the U.S. company. It also came with a non-exclusive licensing agreement for HTC intellectual property.
HTC is one of the earliest companies that ventured into the space of XR, an umbrella term for several immersive technologies, including virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Since launching its first VR headset in 2016, HTC is now competing in an increasingly crowded field with U.S. tech titans such as Apple and Meta, which in recent years have ramped up their efforts in producing AI headsets and smart glasses.
HTC used to be among the dominating forces in the smartphone industry, but has been losing its market share over the past decade or so to overseas peers such as Apple and Samsung, as well as Chinese companies like Huawei and Xiaomi. The married couple behind HTC, Chen Wenchi and Wang Cher, were Taiwan’s richest with a combined fortune of $8.8 billion in 2011. They later departed from the three-comma club after HTC’s smartphone business lost its luster.