Change Of Owner Doesn't Translate Into Change Of Fortune For Siemens Mobile Phone Unit
from the nobody's-answering-that-call dept
Last year, Siemens finally decided to sell its mobile-phone unit to Taiwan's BenQ, since it had long been a drag on the company. Perhaps that should be "sell", since BenQ didn't pay anything for the unit, and Siemens spent 50 million euros on BenQ shares as part of the deal, and also pumped 250 million more into the unit to support it. As we noted at the time, it really wasn't clear why BenQ thought they'd be able to turn the unit around -- and they haven't been able to, losing $760 million or so since they took it over, leading them to decide to pull the plug on it this week. The problem the unit faced when it was part of Siemens was clear: the top 5 handset vendors sell 80 percent of the world's handsets, leaving about 100 other companies fighting for the other 20 percent, or roughly just 200 million handsets. For any company without the scale to break into the leading pack, business is going to be difficult. But while the market cheered BenQ's decision, Siemens isn't so pleased and says it's considering its legal options while its former employees are getting angry too. Siemens was probably deluding itself a bit if it thought that BenQ could really turn the business around, and its haste to pawn the unit off on somebody instead of shutting it down may now come back to cause it some problems.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Just another F**k up
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
MY FON HAS BEEN STOLEN
THANK U
[ link to this | view in chronology ]