14 DAY TRIAL // According to some recently appeared rumors, Sony Ericsson might buy HTC and merge with it in what could be one of the most important deals in the "modern history" of mobile devices.
A top five handset manufacturer, Sony Ericsson is itself a joint venture, created back in 2001 between Japan's Sony and Sweden's Ericsson. The company has now become one of the major players in the mobile industry and it seems to have the most dedicated fans when it comes to its phones.
Based in Taiwan, HTC currently makes Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and smartphones for lots of important mobile carriers around the world, like O2, Vodafone, Orange, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and Alltel. Many of its products are re-branded by the carriers that sell them, while many others are simply commercialized under the HTC name.
Elektronik Tidningen, a Swedish online publication, says that, while waiting to participate to a conference with HTC, the conference was canceled, the reason being that HTC was under "samg?ende" with Sony Ericsson - "samg?ende" is the Swedish equivalent for "merging". Well, this sounds pretty serious, it's just that there haven't been any official declarations to sustain the merging. Moreover, according to Engadget, which quotes an unnamed HTC representative, the Taiwan-based company denies everything, saying that "This is just a rumor and there is no truth to this statement". Therefore, for the moment there's nothing to actually make us believe the whole story.
Anyway, a merging between SE and HTC is not something that surprising (in case it does happen). We're saying this because Xperia X1, Sony Ericsson's flagship handset that should hit the market in September this year, is actually manufactured by HTC and its first codename was HTC Venus. We can't know for sure why Sony Ericsson chose not to produce the X1 itself, but we do know one thing: HTC is "the king" when it comes to Windows Mobile devices. And since Xperia X1 runs on the latest Windows Mobile 6.1, we suppose Sony Ericsson thought HTC would do a better job in building the handset. Well, seeing what Xperia X1 has to offer, the Swedish-Japanese joint venture seems to have done a good thing with outsourcing the production of the device.
Now, back to the supposed merging: in most cases, when a company buys another one, the future products of the newly formed company have features that are resulted from the best traits of the "old" products. So, following this premise, in the eventuality that Sony Ericsson indeed buys HTC, mobile users will be the ones to benefit the most from this.
Whether the merging happens or not, Sony Ericsson and HTC will surely continue to collaborate, especially since, besides the X1, there are other Xperia handsets in the making and we know who is going to produce them (hint: not Sony Ericsson).