Attendees play with the HTC Vive virtual reality device on February 26, 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.
Charlie Perez/Nurphoto via Getty Images
HTC, the Taiwanese consumer electronics maker best known for its smartphones, has sold part of its extended reality (XR) business to Google for $250 million.
HTC will transfer some employees from the XR team to Google as part of the deal, the publicly traded company said in a statement Thursday. HTC will also grant Google non-exclusive XR intellectual property rights. HTC said the deal is expected to be completed in the first quarter of this year.
Google said in a separate statement that the deal will accelerate the development of its Android XR platform across headphones and smart glasses. It added that HTC's immersive technology engineers are a “strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space.”
The deal 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 employees and experience working on Google's Pixel smartphones to the US company. It also signed a non-exclusive license agreement for HTC's intellectual property.
HTC was one of the first companies to venture into the XR space, an umbrella 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 giants such as Apple and Yuan, which have stepped up their efforts in recent years to produce AI headsets and smart glasses. .
HTC was once a dominant force in the smartphone industry, but over the past decade or so it has lost market share to overseas peers such as Apple and Samsung, as well as Chinese companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi. The married couple, after HTC, Chen Wenchi and Wang Cher, are Taiwan's richest, with a combined hit of $8.8 billion in 2011. They later left the trio's club after HTC's smartphone business lost its luster.
