NEC Mobile to pull out of Europe
19th
September 2006
Mobile Gazette has learned that
NEC Mobile is reported to be finalising plans to withdraw
from the European marketplace, at least temporarily.
Back in 2003, NEC seemed to be poised
for success. Partnering with the fledgling Hutchison
3 network, NEC produced some of the first 3G phones
for the European network, including the NEC E808 (pictured
below) - a handset with a QWERTY keyboard and email
support that was somewhat ahead of its time, followed
by a number of other 3G devices including the successful
E616 and
the inexpensive NEC
E338.
Despite a promising start, NEC's varied
range of 3G devices failed to compete when the bigger
manufacturers came on line. NEC then spent some time
with low-end devices such as the NEC
E101 before concentrating more on i-mode devices
for carriers such as O2.
Despite
being among the first to market with both 3G and i-mode
handsets, NEC's impact on the market had declined to
almost nothing. This is clearly a shame, because NEC
has shown great potential in the past.
NEC's (temporary) departure from Europe
follows on from Panasonic
Mobile, who quite Europe last year.. also vowing
to return. But there's more to this than meets the eye:
Panasonic/Matsushita and NEC, along with chipmaker Texas
Instruments (TI) have formed a joint venture called
Adcore-Tech to manufacture a new range of 3G
and 3.5G technologies. Panasonic's 2005 announcement
said that they would be developing future platforms
on Linux, so the joint NEC-Panasonic-TI company could
well be producing UMTS and HSDPA smartphones in the
future.
It's definitely too early to write off
NEC Mobile. Joint ventures between companies of this
type have been very fruitful in the past, notably with
Sony Ericsson but more recently with BenQ-Siemens. Both
Panasonic and NEC have shown that they are class leaders
in certain technologies - perhaps Adcore-Tech can pull
everything together, and we'll see a newly resurgent
NEC sometime in 2007/8.
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