Sendo made cheap handsets but struggled against bigger rivals

Motorola will buy Sendo's Singapore and UK-based research and development team, its intellectual property portfolio as well as design and test equipment.

About 30 employees will lose their jobs while the remaining 200 staff will transfer to Motorola.

Sendo designed low-cost, customised phones but struggled to compete with bigger players, such as Nokia.

Administrators were called in after Sendo experienced cashflow problems earlier this week.

Sendo International, Sendo Holdings plc, Sendo Telecommunications and Sendo Ltd are all in administration.

Jobs saved

Sendo's affairs are being managed by joint administrators from Kroll, who will write to creditors in the near future.

"There are a number of assets left, but most of the value has already been transferred as part of the Motorola deal," said a spokesman for the administrators.

About 30 employees, largely from the sales team in the UK and Europe, have lost their jobs.

The 170 engineers based in Birmingham and the 30 based in Singapore will transfer to Motorola's mobile devices business.

The intellectual property portfolio includes 50 existing and 40 pending patents.

Small player

Sendo was founded six years ago by former Motorola employee Hugh Brogan and found a niche designing and delivering low-cost, highly-customised mobile handsets for operators such as Vodafone and Virgin Mobile.

But despite revenues of �231m in 2004, it struggled to compete with big names such as Nokia.

Sendo was a small player in the global market and sold about five million handsets in 2004 compared with total global mobile sales of about 684 million.

Under the agreement, Motorola is not acquiring the larger business of Sendo Ltd or any of its manufacturing or supply relationships, or any of its capital or real assets, handset inventories, sales offices, liabilities or financial obligations.