HTC said its sales in October 2014 were down on the previous month, having said only last week that the current quarter “provides an indication that it’s our intention to grow again”.

But the decline does not come as a surprise: sales and finance head Chialin Chang said in a conference call last week that the October numbers would be down on September, before picking up momentum in November and December.

Sales for the month of October came in at TWD15.75 billion ($516.4 million), down 5.79 per cent over the prior sequential month. More positively, this represents a 5.04 per cent year-on-year uplift.

For the year to date, revenue of TWD155.8 billion is down 11.23 per cent.

While HTC has had numerous, and well documented, struggles in the ever competitive smartphone market, in fact the company has reported several profitable quarters recently – indeed loss making periods are fairly unusual.

The finance head said that while HTC is building businesses in new markets such as cameras and as manufacturer of Google’s Nexus 9 tablet, its intention is still to show year-on-year growth in the core smartphone business – although this is unlikely to be broken-out in its results.