Sentex Sensing Technology Inc has made a 52 million euro (US$67.4 million) bid to acquire the assets of BenQ Mobile GmbH, the bankrupt German handset business of BenQ Corp (
Sentex's chief executive, Henrik Rubenstein, told Dow Jones Newswires that the bid is based on what he called an earn-out model, meaning that payments would only be made based on the financial success of the company in the future.
He said the biometric-technology company had secured "a three-digit million euro sum" of working capital financing, with the bulk of it to come from the issuance of convertible bonds.
Rubinstein said Sentex wanted to make high-end cellphones with Internet protocol and biometric technology, such as fingerprint, facial and voice recognition systems -- used to replace traditional phone security such as pin codes and which can also be used for payment systems.
"We want to avoid competing with the Nokias of this world by entering this new market," he said.
Sentex, a Nasdaq stock market-listed shell company based in Cleveland, Ohio, has been in talks with BenQ Mobile bankruptcy administrator Martin Prager since late last year.
But Prager has yet to make any final decision. He did not immediately comment on Rubinstein's offer.
Munich-based BenQ Mobile applied for protection from its creditors in September, a year after the Taiwanese company took it over from Siemens AG and tried unsuccessfully to turn it around.
After no bidders came forward by Dec. 31, Prager planned to order the shutdown of BenQ Mobile's office in Munich and its production plant in western Germany, his spokeswoman Regine Petzsch said.
Of BenQ Mobile's 3,000 employees, about 400 have found new jobs, some with Siemens. The remaining 2,600 are to continue receiving most of their previous wages for up to a year under a transitional arrangement largely financed by Siemens.
The Munich-based technology and engineering conglomerate offered the aid after fierce criticism from politicians and labor unions, who accused it of mismanaging the unit and then making misleading claims about BenQ's chances of rescuing it.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts