BenQ Bankrupt: Sad end to former giant of mobile phones

Today brings sad news for the legacy of a former giant and massive major player in the history of mobile telecoms. BenQ announces insolvency and will end its commercial operation. BenQ is not universally known as a brand, even among mobile phones. Until last year the vast majority of that business was the mobile phone manufacturing arm of Siemens the global IT and engineering giant from Germany. Taiwanese phone maker BenQ bought Siemens's phone unit last year.

Siemens had always been a player of engineering excellence and obviously very long history in telecoms worldwide. Some of the Siemens mobile phone innovations included the world's first colour screens on mobile phones (four colour screen on the S10), the first slider phone, the first GPS phone and one of the very first musicphones. Siemens also had a long history of very committed, resourceful and cooperative participation in telecoms standardization and a long legacy of helping developing markets and countries adjust and evolve their infrastructure and even their telecoms legislature etc.

Siemens mobile phones was also one of the giants. Until very recently - just two years ago - Siemens phones held a solid 4th place in world shipments and a 7.3% market share. Today BenQ market share is down to 3.1% and a ranking of sixth, less than half the sales volume of its nearest rival, LG.

Personally, Siemens was always one of my favourites - my grandfather worked for Siemens in Finland in their power transmssion business so I had lots of weird decommissioned but cool electrical power transmission parts as toys to play with as a child whenever we were visiting the grandparents. Siemens also became one of my first customers after I became an independent consultant. I received a lot of work both from the networks side and handsets side of Siemens over the years and had the honour of presenting to the Siemens Academy. I made many good friends in their organizations all around the globe. Now word comes that especially the 3,000 BenQ jobs in Germany are at risk. My thoughts go out to all BenQ employees, and my very best wishes.

If one could seek a silver lining, today at least the mobile telecoms industry is in strong growth all over, so hopefully for anyone suddenly without a job, it becomes easier to discover a new employer and hopefully an unstressful time of change.

My thoughts are with my BenQ friends today.

Comments

[prada]

Pretty good post. Ho appena imbattuto il tuo blog e volevo dire che ho apprezzato molto leggere il tuo post sul blog. Alcun modo sarò sottoscrivendo il feed e spero di postare di nuovo presto.

[Lancel]

Merci après la Grande pour l'info je vais mettre un lien vers ceci sur ma page facebook pour mon disciple vois ceci, je serai bientôt de retour maintenir le bon travail.

[ノースフェイス]

グランビルアイランドのゴールドフロアに韓国の民主主義人民共和国に北朝鮮最高人民会議の常任委員会はさらに、伝統的な朝鮮·中国友好と友好関係を強化し、さらなる対外経済関係の発展を拡大するために経済特区 "判決"を指定するグランビルアイランド（Granville Island）経済特区開発計画の承認、金床の決断を下した "と経済を開発するために外国投資を誘致するため、他のポートや産業分野で積極的になるようにこの機会を利用。