HTC did warn investors to expect a downbeat fourth quarter and now the company's unaudited earnings report confirms it. Q4 2011 generated T$11.02 billion ($366m) in net earnings, which marks a significant drop from the T$14.8b ($492m) the company pulled in during the same period a year earlier. Our initial reaction was to suspect that this was owing to HTC's disastrous market performance in November, when the company took in 20 percent less in gross sales than it had in 2010, but December repeated the same scale of revenue drop: minus 20.3 percent year-on-year. HTC needn't ring any alarm bells just yet, it's a company with a strong portfolio of competitive products, both in the Android and Windows Phone markets, however its period of unconstrained growth seems to be at an end. Now the challenge for the company will be to stabilize its profits and ensure that they don't drop any further.