Philips abandona el negocio de telefonía móvil (Inglés)

AMSTERDAM – Philips Electronics said Thursday that it was quitting the mobile phone business entirely and would sell its remaining activities to China Electronics Corp.
 
Philips entered the handset market in the mid-1990s with the ambition of becoming one of the top three global players. It joined forces with Lucent’s handset business in the late 1990s, but had to unravel that venture after less than two years amid mounting losses.
 
China Electronics, or CEC, which already manufactures handsets for Philips, will take over Philips’s mobile phone business, which generates annual revenue of about €400 million, or $502 million, and has 240 employees, mainly in Asia and Eastern Europe, Philips said.
 
Siemens of Germany made a similar move last year, selling its mobile phone business to BenQ of Taiwan. But BenQ could not turn the business around, and decided to liquidate it last month.
 
CEC, a state-owned Chinese company, will receive a global license to market and sell mobile phones under the Philips brand for five years.
 
The top five mobile phone makers, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG Electronics, had about 80 percent of the global market in the second quarter, according to Strategy Analytics, a market research group. TCL Communication, a rival of CEC’s that acquired the troubled handset business of Alcatel of France, is losing money.
 
Fuente: International Herald Tribune