At Pepcom's MobileFocus event, I talked to Kyocera Wireless' Communications Director, John Chier, who gave me a roundup of the company's current line-up of CDMA phones as well as its first four GSM phones to be introduced exclusively in Latin America. No plans yet to make it available in Europe or elsewhere.

Actually there's really othing to brag about those new GSM phones from Kyocera which will have probably gone unnoticed in a highly competitive GSM market like in Europe.

"There has been a big migration from CDMA to GSM in the Latin America market. And this is going to allow us to save and maintain some very important carrier relationships there. Once that is solidify and established will see what we do from there", said Chier.

Kyocera is now 6th handset maker in the world

Kyocera Wireless was formed in February 2000 when the Japanese company bought Qualcomm's handset division which only made CDMA phones. This week, Kyocera closed the acquisition of Sanyo's handset division which sells 8 to 10 million phones a year and whose 1,700 engineers focus mainly on CDMA and PHS (Japan) technologies.

In a perfect world, Kyocera Wireless will pick the best of both lines. But from my experience, in the real world inside politics always win which bring its lot of bad decision making. Kyocera Wireless will use Sanyo's brand for the next 3 years.

"The combination of those 2 business units [Kyocera Wireless and Sanyo Wireless] instantly makes Kyocera the number 6 handset maker in the world across all technologies... We have the economies of scale, the depth of resources to be a strong competitors with those larger companies [like Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson...]... And being smart and strategic in the order in which we go after these markets, for example starting in Latin America, and as long as we pick our battles very well, we can be very successful".