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Carrier Services
Aufwiedersehen, Siemens
Company sells majority of its telephony business to Arques Industries
by Kendrick Struthers-Watson
So there it is. Some 161 years after the company was started by
31-year-old Werner von Siemens and university engineer Johann Georg
Halske in 1847, the year that Sam Colt sold a version of his legendary
revolver to the U.S. government and Scottish telephone pioneer Alexander
Graham Bell was born, Siemens is no longer a name in telecommunications.
Siemens has sold a majority share of its remaining telephony business
(cordless telephony) to Arques Industries wherein both companies have
agreed to transfer 80.2 per cent of Siemens Home and Office
Communications.
The company also divested 51 percent of its enterprise communications
division (call centre equipment) to US-based Gores Group and of
course, it has rid itself of its network infrastructure business
through the joint venture with Nokia. And to end it all, in a
controversial move, the handset business was ‘sold to Taiwanese BenQ
who were on the verge on seeking legal advice on the procedures.
It is anticipated that many triple zero millions of Euros will be lost
and we’ll keep track of that situation as information becomes
available. In the meantime, Siemens is no longer a force in
telecommunications although the brand will survive in the domestic,
railway rolling stock and high tech medical equipment such as
multi-million euro scanners, but as far as telecommunications is
concerned, Siemens’ service has been curtailed and the line has been
cut, with no chance of reconnection.
The company established the ‘Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens &
Halske to manufacture his first pointer telegraph, a needle that when
activated, pointed out the sequence of transmitted letters from
another source. It was meant to compete with Morse Code but did not,
except in Germany.
The company constructed Europe’s first long-distance telegraph line
stretching 500 kilometres from Bonn to Frankfurt. In 1868 Siemens
started construction of the Indo-European Telegraph line which was
operational in 1870. Messages could arrive from London to Calcutta in
28 minutes rather than the usual 30 days.
Around 1881 Siemens built its first telephone switch and it designed
the ‘Faraday’, the first specialised vessel purely for laying
submarine cable back in 1884.
The company has had many significant firsts in the field of
telecommunications over the past one and a half centuries, but now
it’s time to pull down the curtain, take off the greasepaint and leave
the theatre.
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