Friday, 7 September 2007

BenQ Revamps, Less Noise On Mobile Phones

BenQ, the most ambitious Taiwanese mobile phone maker has revamped and relaunched as a new company with more focus digital projectors, computer monitors and laptops...

BenQ, the most ambitious Taiwanese mobile phone maker has revamped and relaunched as a new company with more focus digital projectors, computer monitors and laptops. One of its main business—mobile phones now no longer gets the attention it did sometime ago.

BenQ is a part of Acer, the world’s fourth largest maker of computers and laptops. Mobile phones were BenQ’s major product line, however its mobile phones business never took off. Despite failing to create a brand, it bought Siemens’ ailing and bleeding mobile phones business in 2005 with a promise to turn it around. Overnight BenQ became the one of the world’s top ten mobile phone makers but a year later; it had to shut down Siemens citing cutthroat competition and an inability to drive down costs at the German unit. By then, it had racked up losses of over Euro 840 million.

As a new entity, BenQ will be a branded division of Qisda Corp. Qisda is the contract-manufacturing unit of the former BenQ. Qisda will spin off BenQ as a separate brand once it becomes healthy.

Now BenQ will focus more on other products such as projectors, laptops, computer monitors and other electronics. Though BenQ will retain mobile portfolio within itself, it will not promote it as much as it earlier.