Philips Electronics is getting out of the mobile phone business and selling its operations to China Electronics Corporation (CEC), its current mobile phone manufacturer. Philips may not have been one of the top 3 players in this area but it still had an annual turnover of about 400 million € (about $500 million USD) and CEC hopes to double that within five years. Under the terms of the deal expected to close by the end of the year, CEC will have a license to use the Philips brand name for the next five years.
The sale comes on the heels of news that BenQ has decided to shut down its mobile phone operations which it had bought from Siemens less than a year ago.