Siemens AG, which will give up its mobile-phone unit to Taiwan's BenQ Corp (明基) later this year after losses mounted, plans to focus on more expensive handsets where margins are higher as users demand more multimedia functions.
The Munich-based company on Thursday unveiled two mobile phones costing about 300 euros (US$362) and 400 euros each that will become available in October and have features including music and video players as well as a camera with a built-in flash.
BenQ has the right to use the Siemens brand on phones for 18 months after changeover, scheduled to take place by the end of September.
With the new phones, Siemens aims to repair both its market share and reputation, which suffered from the sale of faulty phones and a publicly scrutinized search for a partner. Siemens has racked up more than 500 million euros in losses from phones in the past year, and its market share slipped to the lowest level since 1999 in the first quarter, researcher Gartner said in May.
"We will claw our way back to the top," Clemens Joos, who heads Siemens's mobile-phone unit and will become president of the BenQ-owned company, said at the product presentation in Hamburg.
"We will expand the higher-priced market segment, and we have a unique opportunity to do so," Joos said.
Siemens, which is Germany's largest engineering company, this month said it will pull out of the mobile-phone industry after two decades by handing the business and its 7,000 employees to BenQ.
The transfer will cost Siemens about 350 million euros.
Joos said Siemens still plans to introduce more than 10 handsets on its own this calendar year, and the first jointly developed BenQ and Siemens phones may appear in the first three months of next year. The companies plan to start negotiations about which products they will introduce together after receiving regulator approval for the takeover, he said.
The Siemens brand will disappear altogether from mobile phones in five years at the latest, according to the agreement between the two companies.
The phones introduced on Thursday, which Siemens showed together with two new cordless phones, are the SL75 which slides open to reveal the keypad, and the S75 phones targeted at business customers. Siemens was the first company to introduce a phone that slides open in 1997, and producers including Nokia Oyj, the market leader, have followed with similar products.
BenQ has also focused on phones that provide multimedia capabilities such as faster wireless Web access or music players.
Among its phones is a cube-shaped device called the Z2, which offers a special music player, a camera and radio.
The Taiwanese company, which will advance to the No. 5 spot among global handset producers with the takeover, plans to move its global headquarters for handsets to Munich, where Siemens is based. Four senior managers will join the new management team in Munich under Joos, he said on Thursday.
"Employees are now seeing what opportunities there are" in the business under BenQ, Joos said.
"Before, there clearly wasn't any perspective for the business," he said.
The German mobile-phone factory, based in Kamp-Lintfort, where Siemens employs about 2,000 people, will become "a core factory" for BenQ, where the company will house research and development functions as well as the European logistics center for the business, Joos said. The company runs another handset factory in China and one in Brazil.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
TAIWAN VALUE CHAIN: Foxtron is to fully own Luxgen following the transaction and it plans to launch a new electric model, the Foxtron Bria, in Taiwan next year Yulon Motor Co (裕隆汽車) yesterday said that its board of directors approved the disposal of its electric vehicle (EV) unit, Luxgen Motor Co (納智捷汽車), to Foxtron Vehicle Technologies Co (鴻華先進) for NT$787.6 million (US$24.98 million). Foxtron, a half-half joint venture between Yulon affiliate Hua-Chuang Automobile Information Technical Center Co (華創車電) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), expects to wrap up the deal in the first quarter of next year. Foxtron would fully own Luxgen following the transaction, including five car distributing companies, outlets and all employees. The deal is subject to the approval of the Fair Trade Commission, Foxtron said. “Foxtron will be
INFLATION CONSIDERATION: The BOJ governor said that it would ‘keep making appropriate decisions’ and would adjust depending on the economy and prices The Bank of Japan (BOJ) yesterday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years and said more increases are in the pipeline if conditions allow, in a sign of growing conviction that it can attain the stable inflation target it has pursued for more than a decade. Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda’s policy board increased the rate by 0.2 percentage points to 0.75 percent, in a unanimous decision, the bank said in a statement. The central bank cited the rising likelihood of its economic outlook being realized. The rate change was expected by all 50 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The
RSS