Following its recent financial results, HTC really can’t afford to let its latest smartphones go out of stock — but it appears it may not have much choice. The Taiwanese company is reportedly battling a supply issue affecting the new HTC One mini due to a casing shortage.

“The problems with the HTC One Mini, launched in mid-July, come partly from a casing shortage arising from design difficulties,” Reuters reports. Although analysts only expect HTC to ship around 200,000 units of the One mini each month, it’s thought even that number will be hard to achieve until this problem is rectified.

HTC has declined to comment on the problem, but it will no doubt have to come up with some kind of explanation ahead of its next financial results. The company has been struggling lately thanks to strong competition from rivals such as Samsung and Apple, despite launched widely praised handsets like the flagship HTC One.

The company is expected to launch the One max, a larger version of the One with a 5.9-inch display, sometime later this year, but the device is expected to use a similar casing to the One mini’s — only larger. Unless HTC can iron out this supply issue, then, it may have to postpone the launch of a flagship, too, and then things really do go from bad to worse.

• SourceReuters