Although initially successful as a smartphone vendor, competition from Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics, among others, diluted its market share, which reached just 7.2% by April 2015, and the company has experienced consecutive net losses. In 2016, HTC began to diversify its business beyond smartphones, having partnered with Valve to produce a virtual reality platform known as HTC Vive. After having collaborated with Google on its Pixel smartphone, HTC sold roughly half of its design and research talent, as well as non-exclusive rights to smartphone-related intellectual property, to Google in 2017 for billion.