Mobile vendor strategies - 11 June 2005

Siemens sold its mobile phone unit to Taiwanese handset maker BenQ. Siemens will in fact pay € 300m to take a 2.5% stake in BenQ, but leaves a €500m loss per year, some 6,000 people and €4.9bn sales in 2004 with a 5.5% market share. The combined unit should report sales of about $10bn, with shipment of about 60-70m units. This would make BenQ in the top five makers.

Motorola is the leading phone maker in the US with 34% market share, ahead of LG with 17.5%, Samsung with 16.6% and Nokia with 13%. The top three suppliers have grown sales and market share at the expense of Nokia that is loosing 7 points in market share.

UTStarcom is introducing its first wireless handset for WCDMA/GSM/GPRS networks, the GW200.

Alcatel has launched a cellular/ Bluetooth or WiFi solution. Alcatel's UMA solution offers all the flexibility for integration into legacy circuit-switched core network as well as into mobile NGN (Next Generation Networks).

NEC has signed an agreement to establish a 3G mobile infrastructure joint venture in China with Wuhan Research Institute of Post and Telecommunications/ Fiberhome. It also has an agreement on 3G with Siemens, and will use both channels to expand its 3G infrastructure business in China.

Panasonic and UTStarcom have co-developed a compact indoor 3G base station for DoCoMo. Europe could also be a target for this product.

LG (Korea) claimed a 25% market share in the European 3G handset market, with shipping more than 1m 3G units in 1Q05.

Huawei said it has built 11 W-CDMA 3G commercial networks worldwide.

ZTE considers building mobile phone assembly plant in Zambia.