Siemens Mobile / BenQ-Siemens

» see benq-siemens.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In this country the handset question through the whole of the 2000s was Nokia and then everything else, and Siemens was the largest part of everything else. The gray plastic candybars with the odd navigation logic, the ones where the menu was arranged by someone who thought about it differently than the Finns did. They were on desks and in coat pockets everywhere, they were what you bought when you wanted a real phone that was not the phone everybody had, and then within about three years they were not anywhere at all.

Siemens had been in this since 1985, when the Mobiltelefon C1 was a thing you installed rather than carried. The S1 came in 1994 for GSM. The S10 in 1997 was the first phone in the world with a color screen, which at that point meant four colors and was still a genuine first. In 2000 the company bought Bosch's mobile division and shipped the SL45, the first phone with an MP3 player and a memory card in it, a year before the iPod existed. None of that reads like a company about to lose.

The numbers say otherwise and they say it early. Late 2000 was the high water mark at 8.6 percent of the world market and fourth place. By 2003 the share was 8.5 and the names above it had changed, by 2004 it was 7.2, and in the first quarter of 2005 it hit 5.6 percent with LG and Sony Ericsson now ahead. The division was losing money at a rate Siemens AG had stopped tolerating, and Siemens AG is a company with a long history of deciding that something is no longer its problem.

So it paid to leave. On 7 June 2005 BenQ of Taiwan agreed to take the mobile division, and the terms are the part people misremember: Siemens did not receive money, it sent money. Around 250 million euros went in before the transfer with another 100 million written off, and Siemens took a small stake in BenQ and a five-year license on its own name going the other way. The handover completed on 1 October 2005. BenQ-Siemens as a brand launched on 17 January 2006 and the whole thing was in a Munich insolvency court eight months after that.

~ the record ~

~ what they got right first ~

Siemens had a real record of shipping things before anybody wanted them. The color screen in 1997, and a ruggedized outdoor phone the same year, twenty years before that became a product category with a name. A sliding form factor in 1999. Then the SL45 in 2000 with an MP3 player and an MMC slot, which is a music phone arriving a full year ahead of the device that went on to define portable music for a decade.

What it never had was a reason for you to want the next one. Nokia sold an interface people already knew and a build quality that had become a joke about survivability. Siemens sold specifications. It went further sideways than most, launching the Xelibri line in 2003, phones designed as fashion accessories in shapes that had nothing to do with holding them to your head, which is remembered now as one of the more expensive mistakes of the period.

~ the year it stopped working ~

BenQ wanted the fourth-largest handset business on earth for the price of agreeing to run it, and got a business that had been shedding share for five straight years along with German labor costs and German plants. The BenQ-Siemens phones that shipped in 2006 were the models already in the Siemens pipeline with a new badge on them. Nothing about the arrangement had time to produce anything else.

On 28 September 2006 BenQ's board in Taiwan stopped funding the German subsidiary. The insolvency filing went in the next day. The parent company survived intact and still sells monitors today, which is the ordinary outcome when a group buys a business through a separate legal entity and then declines to keep it alive.

~ kamp-lintfort ~

Around 3,000 people worked for the German operation, most of them in Munich and at two plants in North Rhine-Westphalia. Roughly 2,000 were let go at the end of October 2006. The Kamp-Lintfort factory kept a skeleton crew going into the new year and closed on 30 January 2007 with the last 165 workers on the site.

It became a political story in Germany for a season, because Siemens had paid a Taiwanese company to take a division and eleven months later the workers were gone while the executives who signed the deal were not. The Siemens brand license ran on for a few more years and a handful of phones came out under it, sold in markets where the name still meant something. In Turkey they turned up in the shops next to the Nokias for a while, cheaper than they had been, from a company that no longer existed.

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