HTC revealed that Q4 2015 had been another lossmaking three months, revealing in a conference call that “to be very candid, our flagship did not perform well”.

Chialin Chang, HTC’s CFO and president of global sales, continued: “Actually I would say our flagships fell far short of our expectations for the entire cycle of 2015.”

While the lack of sales for high-margin products troubled the vendor last year, it is “expecting an improving cycle coming into the second quarter”.

The company is expected to launch a new flagship in the coming weeks, although it is not clear if this will be at Mobile World Congress or at a separate event after.

The company reported a loss for the quarter of TWD3.4 billion ($101.4 million), compared with a slim profit in the year-ago period (TWD0.5 billion). Revenue of TWD25.7 billion was down from TWD47.9 billion.

Accentuating the positives, the company noted that both figures marked a sequential improvement from Q3. In terms of products, it said that its Desire series “experienced good momentum over the Q4 holiday season”, with the One A9 “well received across Asia, US and Europe”.

The company separately released January 2016 sales figures of TWD6.48 billion, which were down 47.23 per cent year-on-year, and down 0.6 per cent from the previous month.

The CFO said the company is taking a “focused” approach to 2016 in term of where revenue is generated and from which products.

“Are we going to focus Under Armour Health Box in China or India? Probably not. It’s the same thing on virtual reality. We are going to focus on different countries, it’s going to be the US, UK and Germany, to some extent China, and some other countries not,” he said.

“That applies to smartphones. Even for a large display phone, are we going to focus a lot in the US? Probably not, probably not even the UK or Germany, where we’ll focus on different small form factors, and different pricing. It’s focused,” the CFO continued.