Motorola May Spin Off Handsets Unit - iPhone's First Casualty? 7 comments
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Motorola is exploring spinning off its mobile devices unit “to recapture global market leadership and to enhance shareholder value.”
The move comes in an ever increasingly tight market which has seen Apple capture 19.5% of the smartphone market in its first twelve months, a new iPhone style device announced by GPS provider Garmin, and a slew of Android powered phones coming later this year, including at least one mobile phone from computer maker Dell.
Motorola’s mobile phone market share has continued to slide in the face of existing competition with the handset unit recording a $1.2 billion loss in the 4th quarter of 2007.
Although mobile phones are still perhaps the public face of Motorola, the company is also an enterprise provider of communications tools to business, Government and the military.
We’re placing Motorola’s handset unit on Deadpool watch. Motorola has had a mixed track record of spinning off companies, having success with Freescale Semiconductor, however Iridium saw what was once the worlds leading commercial satellite network file for bankruptcy in 1999.
A new company based around a business unit with a $1.2 billion loss is going to take some serious work in turning around under normal circumstances, but in a market that will see a slew of new competitors and where a new comer such as Apple can take such a big slice of the market in such a short time, it will be harder again, if not near on impossible.
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Anyway, Duncan, firstly, Motorola's problems did not start with iPhone. Secondly, 19.2% smartphone market share is in the US, the business Motorola operates in is global. In the US cell phone market, iphone has a 3-4% market share.
Third, other products you mention are announcements, they cannot have anything to do with the Motorola's downfall even in theory.
Thomas, iPhone is following the razr product cycle, this means that in year or two (in the end), iphones are the phones given away for free with subscribtions.
Is that what you are seeing in your crystal ball?
The thing you are missing is that even subscriptions would be income for Apple. And the volume would be HUGE.
Thomas Barta - do you have any clue what Apple needs to do to compete with RIM? How about TripleDES? A proper enterprise server?
How about not having all it's applications running as root so one vulnerability doesn't give someone control of the whole phone?
No, your extreme bias will not make Blackberry go away as much as you'd like
As of iPhone firmware version 1.1.4, none of the applications run at root level. Apple is currently testing Microsoft Exchange Mail functionality and will soon release that, which is when the real penetration of the iPhone into the enterprise space will happen.
MOT today, RIMM tomorrow and NOK next. It's just a matter of time.
The Exchange Direct Push support has no release date so I'm not sure where you get soon from?
Direct push while good has an annoying password changing problem the BB doesn't have to deal with, if you used a CE device you'll know what I mean.
The BB is a near flawless device that does everything right.
I know,I know Apple can do nothing wrong, the price won't continue to come down and they will never have problem taking market share.