Zuckerberg will call
The world’s largest social network Facebook, together with the Taiwanese company HTC, plans to release its own smartphone model next year. Facebook representatives are sure that if this is not done, the network risks becoming an ordinary application.
According to Bloomberg, the release of the smartphone was postponed from the end of 2012 to the middle of 2013 in order to “give HTC employees more time to work on the device.” Facebook is currently working on its own modified version of the Android-based operating system, which is closely integrated with Facebook’s online services.
Analysts believe that Facebook now has two priority projects in the field of mobile devices: the release of its own smartphone and the refinement of the iPhone application (interestingly, former Apple programmers were hired to solve this task).
It’s no secret that Facebook is currently experiencing some difficulties with monetization of the social network on mobile devices. More than half of Facebook’s 900 million users log into the social network using mobile devices, while last year the company’s revenue from advertising sales, amounting to $3.15 billion, did not include mobile advertising revenue (there simply were none). “More and more people are using mobile devices, and Facebook is not yet able to profit from it,” said an analyst at Topeka Capital Markets Inc. Victor Anthony.
According to experts, the release of its own smartphone will attract more advertisers in the field of mobile advertising, and, of course, enter a new market for the company.
Whether the launch of its own smartphone will lead to direct competition with Apple and Google is a big question, but analysts are convinced that this will allow the social network to protect itself from their influence. As Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, notes, “Facebook representatives are afraid of Apple’s strong influence on the mobile market. For example, Apple may one day say that it has decided to make the Google+ social network the default service in its devices. That’s why Facebook is interested in having its own smartphone.”
Recall that this is Facebook’s third attempt to create its own smartphone. For the first time the company started working in this direction in 2010, but then the project was not implemented. Last year, Facebook, together with HTC, began work on creating a smartphone called Buffy, which has not yet been completed.
