March 8, 2006

BenQ Mobile continues its product offensive designed to show it has shrugged off some of its problems inherited from Siemens, the owner of the mobile phone business until last summer.

BenQ displayed six new multimedia handsets, taking its number of new models this year so far to twelve and said it had done a deal to sell phones from April with preinstalled Google software for local information searches.

BenQ Mobile, a unit of Taiwanese technology group BenQ, also said at the CeBIT technology fair it would start selling handsets in April that could download software upgrades over the air, eliminating the need for customers to connect to the Internet or take their phone into a shop for updates.

BenQ took over the failing mobile phone business from German conglomerate Siemens last summer. It is now the world's sixth-biggest maker of mobile handsets.

BenQ Mobile, which is still based in Munich, Germany, is determined to show it can bring cutting-edge products quickly to market, in contrast to when Siemens ran the business.

Last month at the 3GSM wireless trade show in Barcelona, the company said it would be the first to launch an HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access) phone. HSDPA promises wireless Internet access and other services at speeds comparable to home broadband.

BenQ Mobile is also mulling where to produce its phones in future. It inherited two large sites in Germany that Siemens had guaranteed to keep open rather than moving production to cheaper regions, in exchange for thousands of employees working longer hours under a deal that expires in June.

BenQ Mobile says it has offered to extend the agreement but the IG Metall trade union has not yet decided whether to accept.

Chief Executive Clemens Joos, who said last month that production in Germany was "always threatened," told Reuters on Wednesday he expected to start talks with IG Metall in May.

Source: C-Net News