BRUSSELS-A newly formed company recently announced it plans to buy the paging business of
Philips Electronics Inc., following that company’s termination of its joint venture with Lucent Technologies
Inc.
Advantra International was formed recently by Page+ and Acyclon Electronics, and hopes to become the
world’s fourth-largest pager manufacturer through the deal. In 1997, Advantra produced 120,000 pagers with sales of
$10 million.
Philips last year made some 1.2 million pagers.
According to Advantra, Philips wanted to focus on
its core strengths of Global System for Mobile communications technology-based handsets and therefore unloaded all
other mobile communications operations to do so.
According to published reports, the new pager manufacturing
business will be based in Cambridge, England, with production plants in Mexico and Belgium. The Mexican plant is
expected to produce 85 percent of the company’s product load.
Philip’s paging business is licensed for FLEX
protocol-based devices and introduced its first FLEX product in November, a one-line, one-way alphanumeric pager.
Advantra plans to enter the two-way paging market using the FLEX licensing gained from the Philips acquisition.
