Founded in May 1997 by Cher Wang, chairwoman, and Peter Chou, president and CEO, HTC built a strong industry reputation as the company behind some of the world's leading white-labelled high-end handhelds. In a decade the company has grown in size from just ten founding employees to nearly 5,000 staff today-over 1,200 of which are focused on research and development. With an enviable list of "world firsts" to its name (see company history box), HTC already has an impressive heritage. But in order to survive in today's marketplace HTC needed to broaden its offering and diversify. This meant that a move out of the comfort zone of producing white labelled devices for operators was an inevitability. The Taiwanese firm began shipping devices in Europe under the HTC brand in June 2006, then globally in April 2007. In May 2007, as part of what Informa Telecoms & Media analyst Gavin Byrne described as "a logical progression", it launched the first of a series of high profile own-branded devices, the Touch, aimed fairly and squarely at the consumer market.
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