Efforts to save BenQ’s German phone unit fail

“The last interested party has withdrawn. There is no realistic chance that the business can be sold as a whole,” a spokeswoman for the administrators, Martin Prager, said in Munich.

More than 3,000 people were employed until last year at the company’s Munich headquarters and at the manufacturing facilities in Kamp-Lintfort and Bocholt in Germany. Mobile phone production at Kamp-Lintfort in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia ceased at the end of January.

Siemens sold the loss-making company to BenQ Corp. in 2005, and its collapse the following year triggered allegations the mobile maker had been closed down in a way that reduced losses to the Siemens. Siemens spokesman Marc Langendorf said Saturday that the decision was up to the administrators. “Our central aim was to help the staff,” he said.

At the time of the takeover, BenQ Corp. received several hundred million euros from Siemens as a sweetener to the takeover, but the mobile phone company declared itself insolvent in September last year.

According to German media reports, BenQ Mobile is to be broken up for separate sale with considerable loss to its creditors.

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