MOTOROLA ACQUIRES UNIQUE KNOWLEDGE

MOBILE PHONES: Having acquired a development department employing 300 highly trained engineers from a brief Taiwanese electronics venture in Aalborg, Motorola is now surging ahead with Danish-developed mobile phones

When Motorola had the opportunity in the summer of 2006 to acquire Danish development competences in mobile phones, it took full advantage and gained the services of 300 highly trained engineers in software, hardware, systems, and electronics. This became possible when Taiwanese electronic entertainment giant BenQ, which had acquired Siemens’ development department for mobile phones the previous year, withdrew from the mobile phone market. Located in the unique R&D wireless technology environment in the northern city of Aalborg, the department had all the competences Motorola could wish for.

Bought and sold five times over
“Actually, we have really been acquired five times in the last 18 years,” says Motorola’s Danish director Flemming Eriksen. “From Dancall to Amstrad, from Amstrad to Bosch, from Bosch to Siemens, and from Siemens to BenQ. And now Motorola. The small group, which started making some of the world’s first mobile phones at Dancall, has today become more than 300 people. And having been acquired by Motorola, things are going faster and faster.” “The reason why we have been so sought after is the knowledge we have accumulated through our close association with the wireless network that has evolved in this region,” says Flemming Eriksen. “We can do it all, from systems, software and hardware to electronics, and production processes. There are few who can do that, all under the same roof.”

Blurring the borders between mobile phones and the Internet
“We focus exclusively on product development,” says Flemming Eriksen. “Sometimes with proposals from Motorola in Chicago, but often with ideas and input from us.” In August 2007, after only 14 months’ ownership of the development group in Aalborg, Motorola will market the group’s first product, after which new products will be marketed at intervals of a few months.

“They are telephones with completely new applications, which blur the borders between the mobile phone, PC and access to the Internet,” says Flemming Eriksen. “They are highly complex challenges which our system know-how is perfectly suited to solve.”