BenQ Mobile to be split up and sold
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InfoWorld - Attempts to find an investor for bankrupt German mobile phone maker BenQ Mobile have failed, after the last potential buyer ended negotiations, the company&#39;s insolvency administrator said Sunday.
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A breakup between XM and Starbucks, and two good buys.
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Non-memory sale to go ahead next month
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Palm Inc., the struggling hand-held device company that makes the Treo, has reached a deal to sell a quarter of the company to a private equity firm for about $325 million.
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BenQ has launched as a new corporation, focusing on digital projectors, computer monitors, and other electronics.
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Company is working on flexible display technologies.
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Orascom Telecom, a leading mobile operator in emerging markets, has raised the possibility that it could be sold as part of further industry consolidation.
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(InfoWorld) - Taiwan's BenQ Corp. launched as a new corporate entity on Sept. 1, with plans to focus on digital projectors, computer monitors and other electronics, while its former main business, mobile phones, takes a back seat. It's a big change from a year ago. BenQ has now come full circle from its 2005 takeover of Siemens AG's mobile phone unit. The Taiwanese company was never able to turn the troubled business around, despite Siemens paying BenQ â¬250 million (US$340.8 million) to take the ailing division off its hands. Six money-losing quarters after the acquisition, BenQ called it quits, citing cutthroat competition and an inability to drive down costs at the German unit. By then, it had racked up losses of over â¬840 million. In its new form, BenQ is the branded division of Qisda Corp., which replaced the old name, BenQ, as the legal entity and the company listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Qisda is the manufacturing side of the former BenQ, and the plan is to spin off the new BenQ within the next few years once it's healthy. One of the biggest changes at BenQ is a lighter focus on mobile phones. While BenQ will still market handsets and focus on select markets, it will drop high profile advertising campaigns such as sponsorship of the Real Madrid football club and other big budget programs. Instead, it will target a smaller budget on its strongest products. This year, the company's best products are digital projectors and computer monitors, which it expects to lead it to a break-even year on sales of around NT$60 billion (US$1.82 billion). By 2009, the company forecasts sales to reach NT$100 billion. Hurdles remain. The insolvency administrator of the company's former mobile phone unit in Germany, BenQ Mobile GmbH & Co. OHG, is suing Qisda to recoup over â¬100 million in past account payables and employee bonuses. Qisda is considering filing counterclaims against the lawsuits. Qisda executives also face the prospect of jail time for alleged insider stock trading in Taiwan, related to when the company revealed losses tied to BenQ Mobile. The Taoyuan District Court in Taiwan started court proceedings against some Qisda executives in mid-July, including Chairman K.Y. Lee and Chief Financial Officer Eric Yu. Qisda has denied any wrongdoing on the part of its executives. Â
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Motorola needs a successor to its  successful RAZR phone to hold on to market share, and BenQ  Mobile is set to make gains when new products kick in, market  research group Gartner said in a survey on Wednesday.
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Company will exit the flat panel TV market.
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The planned $3 billion deal would give Sony a library of more than 4,100 titles. Also: Vivendi says its recovery is almost complete, despite large losses & hellip;. Canon and Toshiba team up to produce next-generation flat display panels & hellip;. and more.
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(InfoWorld) - For years, two South Korean giants have dominated the LCD (liquid crystal display) panel industry, but a recent merger in Taiwan has propelled AU OptronicsÂ into the running for the top spot. Fresh competition at the top should ensure LCD makers continue to find new ways to lower prices so they can lure users to buy new LCD TVs, larger desktop displays, and laptop computers with bigger screens. In fact, the big three all continue to invest in new LCD factories designed to lower costs, and they unanimously forecast falling LCD panel prices during the first three months of this year. AU, the world's third largest maker of LCD (liquid crystal display) screens,Â merged with Quanta DisplayÂ late last year, raising its share of the global LCD panel market to nearly match that of Samsung Electronics and LG.Philips Co.Â  Although the company remains in third place, it is just a sliver of market share away from the top, and on Thursday, AU said its work to integrate the new factories acquired in the Quanta Display deal is running smoothly. The company has already turned Quanta Display's operations profitable after two money-losing quarters previously, said Max Cheng, chief financial officer at AU, at the company's fourth-quarter investor conference Thursday. The smaller LCD maker had been suffering against its larger rivals because it couldn't compete as well on cost. In general, larger makers can offer volume discounts to big customers, and gain other cost advantages through mass production. The merger helped propel AU's LCD panel shipments past Samsung Electronics for the first time ever during the fourth quarter. The Taiwanese company shipped 16.6 million large-sized LCD panels in the fourth quarter, and 24.5 million small and medium sized panels, it said. Samsung shipped 15.5 million large-sized panels and 24.8 million small and medium sized panels, according to information on its Web site. The Samsung figures do not include output from S-LCD Corp., aÂ joint venture between Sony and SamsungÂ that produces large-sized LCD panels used by both companies. Large-sized LCD panels are described as those 10 inches in size or bigger, such as panels used as the screen part of a laptop computer, desktop monitor or LCD-TV. Small and medium-sized panels are the screen parts of devices such as mobile phones, and GPS (global positioning system) navigation devices. The shipment figures don't mean AU is already number one in LCDs. The top company, LG.Philips LCD Co., does not break down panel shipments, choosing to give its figure in millions of square meters because the size of panels differs so much. LG shipped 2.3 million square meters of panels in the fourth quarter. Neither AU nor Samsung provide shipment information in square meters. According to market researcher DisplaySearch, part of the NPD Group, LG.Philips ranked first in panel shipments last year, followed closely by Samsung, and then AU Optronics. There are only a few percentage points of market share separating the three. The next competitor listed, Chi Mei Optoelectronics of Taiwan, is nearly 10 percentage points away from first place. By other popular measures used to rank companies in an industry, such as revenue, Samsung comes out on top, with LG.Philips second, and AU Optronics in third. Samsung's LCD business posted fourth quarter revenue of 3.18 trillion Korean won (US$3.48 billion as of Dec. 31, the last day of the reporting period), while LG.Philips' revenue came in at 3.06 trillion won (US$3.34 billion) and AU's was NT$94.65 billion [B] New Taiwan dollars (US$2.91 billion). The nearest competitor to the top three was Japan's Sharp Corp., which posted revenue at its LCD component business of Â¥241.4 billion (US$2.03 billion) for the three months ending Dec. 31. Going forward, Taiwanese companies appear to be more aggressive in their capital spending (capex) plans for this year. In fact, AU Optronics plans to spend more on new factory production lines this year than any other LCD maker, between NT$90 billion and NT$95 billion (US$2.92 billion). The top end of that range is nearly double Samsung's estimate of 1.41 billion won (US$1.52 billion), which excludes spending on S-LCD. Chi Mei has said it will spend NT$75 billion (US$2.30 billion), making it the next biggest spender after AU Optronics. Â
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Under mounting pressure from German government officials and former employees of the mobile phone division it paid BenQ to take off its hands, Siemens has set up a â¬35 million ($44.4 million) fund to aid workers at risk of losing their jobs.
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Telstra has announced the break-up of its wholesale unit, including the creation of a separate media and content division, to address the concerns of the competition regulator before the company&#39;s full privatisation.
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BT Group Plc, the UK&#39;s largest phone operator, agreed to sell its stake in Eutelsat SA for 363 million pounds ($685 million) in cash, marking the company&#39;s exit from the satellite operating business.
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Taiwan&#39;s BenQ is showing off a new user interface on an ultramobile PC that it plans to start marketing in the second quarter of this year, a spokeswoman for the company said Tuesday.The device is being displayed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as part of BenQ&#39;s new mobile offerings. It was first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year.BenQ has taken on the new moniker coined by Intel, &#39;mobile Internet device (MID)&#39; for its new gadget, a name that appears to be replacing the term &#39;ultramobile PC.&#39; Ultramobiles have so far not fared well in global markets, despite a much hyped launch and&#160;backing by heavyweights such as Microsoft and Intel.BenQ&#39;s MID sports a Linux OS, but the company tweaked the user interface to work more closely with its functions. Although full details have not yet been released, the company has said the MID is equipped for wireless Internet use via Wi-Fi, or with 3G (third generation telecommunications) networks, which also enable voice phone calls.The Linux OS was developed by China&#39;s Red Flag, but BenQ customized the interface to make its MID unique, said Jean Hsu, a BenQ representative.The MID also features a 4.8-inch touch screen, 0.3-megapixel Web cam, and on board sensors that minimize and pop up all open Windows when you shake the device, instead of making you touch each tab individually.BenQ&#39;s MID uses Intel&#39;s Menlow set of chips, which includes a low-power microprocessor code-named Silverthorne and a chipset codenamed Poulsbo. Intel designed Menlow for ultramobile devices.Companies are developing ultramobile PCs and MIDs in a bid to attract users to device slightly smaller than notebook PCs, but with full PC functionality. Some analysts see the devices as the PC industry&#39;s answer to smartphones, but point out that many ultramobiles do not include telecommunications functions. BenQ&#39;s new MID does include telecommunications capabilities with its 3G support.
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The Palm 500 runs on Windows Mobile and likely will be sold by Vodafone.