The following e-mail will be sent on your behalf.

 has sent the following story to you from ElectricNews.net.

The story is available from https://electricnews.net/news.html?code=4745842

Siemens searches for mobile partner 
Thursday, November 22 2001
by Matthew Clark


Siemens, the number five maker of mobile phones, said on Wednesday that it was
looking for partners to help boost its struggling mobile-phone unit.

In the last quarter, the company's mobile phone division lost EUR22 million
(USD19.4 million). Siemens had said in the past that it hoped to become the
number two maker of mobile phones and it planned to do it on its own. But
according to research company Gartner, the industry is now in state of unrest as
worldwide mobile phone shipments totalled 94.4 million units in Q3, a nine
percent decline. 



There has been speculation that Siemens will partner with one of dominant Asian
phone makers with Toshiba topping the list of possibilities. However, Siemens
would not confirm which companies it is in talks with and Hitachi, Palm and NEC
have all been suggested. 



With the unrest in the industry, the possibility of a Siemens joint venture does
not come as a shock. Already in the year Ericsson and Sony formed Sony Ericsson
mobile communications in an attempt to compete with the market leader Nokia. The
announcement of that venture followed Philips decision earlier in the year to
pull out of handset production all together. 



But these kinds of tie-ups can also be risky. In 2000 both Sony and Qualcomm as
well as Lucent and Philips attempted similar ventures both of which turned out to
be failures.





"The mobile phone industry has been impacted by repeated delays in the
availability of general packet radio service (GPRS) terminals and the effect of
the widespread economic downturn on regions where mobile connection growth has
traditionally been high, such as Latin America," said Bryan Prohm, senior
analyst with the mobile communications worldwide research group for Gartner
Dataquest. 





Ben Wood, another senior Gartner analyst went on to say that much of the slowdown
in handset sales has come from "the astonishingly lacklustre performance of the
Western European market." That region accounted for about a third of annual
mobile terminal sales in 1999 and 2000 which started to fall for the first time
in the second quarter of 2001. 



Earlier this week Gartner ranked the top five mobile handset manufacturers in
terms of units shipped. Nokia led the way with a 33 percent market share,
although Motorola had made gains inching up almost two points to reach a 15.7
percent market share. Ericsson, Samsung and Siemens followed in that order. 







"Nokia, for the first time, has one of the older product portfolios among the
leading manufacturers, a development that undoubtedly resulted in the loss of
some global system for mobile communications (GSM) market share to competitors
with more contemporary designs," said Prohm.