When it became clear that Taiwan’s BenQ was going to buy the seriously troubled mobile handset unit of Siemens AG, the warnings came out like penalty flags on a Sunday afternoon. But in a dazzling example of faith-based policy making, senior management pressed forward undeterred.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

In late September, about a year and a billion dollars later, BenQ pulled the plug on what had become BenQ Mobile’s European division.  And the fall-out continues.  Following a record-breaking 3Q loss, BenQ struggles to acquire needed operating funds.   The company has sold off assets , and last month the Board agreed to issue unsecured bonds.  Today, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reports that along with the issue of those bonds, BenQ will sell 1.5% of the outstanding stock of successful Taiwanese panel-maker AUO.

What gets unfairly roughed up by this cellular silliness are BenQ’s mainstream display-centric products.  Shipments of the company’s projectors, for instance, reached another record in November, DigiTimes reported today.  And last January at CES, BenQ told Insight Media it would be selling large-screen LCD-TV sets incorporating AUO’s anti-motion-blur gray-frame-insertion technology during 4Q’06 - that is, now.  

Well, we won’t be seeing those fast-motion LCD-TVs at CES’07, which would have been a first, and we won’t be seeing BenQ’s super-short-response-time monitors targeted at the gaming community, and we won’t be seeing any of those very appealing home projectors.  The reason, according to Insight Media’s sources, is that BenQ withdrew from CES and paid a hefty penalty for the privilege.  The goal, presumably, is to save some of that precious cash.

So let’s see if I have this straight.  You spend a billion dollars on what many people believed to be - and proved to be - a terminally ill German cell-phone company, and you starve the marketing efforts for the products you can actually sell.   Yup.   That’s it.  Now we understand BenQ perfectly.