The breakup of Motorola became effective Tuesday: Motorola Mobility (MMI) gets cellular handsets and set-top boxes, Nokia Siemens (NOK) gets the cellular infrastructure business, Motorola Solutions (MSI) gets government & industrial radio clients, and Sanjay Jha gets to be COO.
The split brought a nice day one stock bounce of 9.5% for MMI and 6.6% for MSI.
On one level, it marks an ignominious end for the company that invented the handheld cellphone. It also clears the way for one or both of the companies to be gobbled up by bigger companies — no small concern given that Carl Icahn owns $2b worth of shares and (as always) wants to maximize his own short-term return rather than build a long-term winner.
It didn’t have to come to this: Motorola was the world leader in handset sales as late as 1997 and second until 2007, when it still led the US cellphone market. However, it was late to shift to digital and late to shift to software. (By comparison, the infrastructure business was never able to master the complexity of telephone switching and became uncompetitive once mobile radio technology diffused throughout the industry.)
Its handset business has been losing money for many years. As announced in March 2008, the handset spinoff was an attempt by CEO Greg Brown to dump the losing handset business after being unable to sell it. Even with its recent improvement, its survival is by no means certain.
Motorola co-CEO (now MMI founding CEO) Sanjay Jha deserves full credit for the turnaround over the past 30 months, in large part through his bold decision to bet the farm on Android. It’s too soon the say whether the turnaround is permanent, as MMI faces brutal competition
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Dr. Joel West is professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Keck Graduate Institute, one of the seven Claremont Colleges in Los Angeles County. He was co-editor of the book Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Oxford, 2006). His consulting focuses on IP strategies and business models for software and Internet service companies. Before KGI, he spent nine years as a faculty member at the San Jose State College of Business, was president and co-founder of Palomar Software and also a columnist for MacWEEK.
For more information, see Joel’s website (https://www.joelwest.org/) and the home page for his blogs (https://www.joelwest.org/blogs).