The German mobile phone unit of Taiwan's BenQ Corp. will shut down, a spokeswoman for its insolvency administrator said Tuesday, after no investor stepped in to rescue the struggling division.
BenQ Mobile applied for protection from its creditors in September, a year after the Taiwanese company took it over from Siemens AG and tried unsuccessfully to turn it around.
After no bidders came forward by Dec. 31, administrator Martin Prager will order the shutdown of BenQ Mobile's office in Munich and its production plant in western Germany, his spokeswoman Regine Petzsch said.
However, the head of the unit's works council said it was still possible that an investor will come forward with a plan to resume production.
Michael Leucker said he had been in contact with a German-American investor interested in buying the factory and salvaging hundreds of jobs. He didn't identify the potential investor.
Of BenQ Mobile's 3,000 employees, about 400 have found new jobs, some of them with Siemens. The remaining 2,600 are to continue receiving most of their previous wages for up to a year under a transitional arrangement largely financed by Siemens.
The Munich-based technology and engineering conglomerate offered the aid after fierce criticism from politicians and labor unions, who accused it of mismanaging the unit and then making misleading claims about BenQ's chances of rescuing it.
Siemens has since been engulfed in controversy over a cross-border corruption investigation into suspicious payments totaling 420 million euros ($554 million).
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