Motorola realigns mission
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Motorola Inc. Tuesday sliced about 1,000 jobs at its Schaumburg headquarters, Deer Park and elsewhere while posting hundreds of new jobs to strengthen its mission to produce seamless mobility products.
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The company announces a new version of its wireless messaging and data access software.
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Motorola is chosen to initiate a line of mobile handsets costing less than $40 to drive take-up in developing countries.
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Motorola Inc , the world's No. 3 mobile phone maker, said on Thursday it is exploring strategic alternatives including a possible separation of its mobile devices business from other units.
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Struggling cell-phone maker Motorola Inc. said Thursday it is considering separating the handset unit from its other businesses in an effort to snap a deep slump that has followed its meteoric success with the Razr.
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(InfoWorld) - Iridium Satellite LLC, the company that raised Motorola Inc.'s expensive space-based network from the ashes of bankruptcy, is now planning a new generation of satellites that may be able to continuously monitor the environment and take pictures of Earth. Iridium was launched in 1998 as a go-anywhere phone service aimed at executives, with outdoor coverage almost everywhere on the planet, including the north and south poles. But its high price and bulky handsets doomed the network to financial failure. The craft stayed aloft and the current company, which took over in 2000, has had more success selling data communications to government and industries such as shipping and aviation along with voice, according to Matt Desch, Iridium's chairman and CEO. Next week at the Satellite 2007 conference in Washington, D.C., the company will unveil an initiative called Iridium Next to build a next-generation network, or "constellation," of satellites. Over the next two years, Iridium will consider technologies and seek partners and financing for the system, which is expected to cost more than US$2 billion to build and deploy, becoming fully operational by 2016. Future services could include environmental monitoring, photography and a geographic positioning system to complement the current GPS (Global Positioning System), Desch said. The current system, consisting of 66 satellites that form a mesh network, provides a baseline speed of only 2.4K bps (bits per second) but supports voice calls, e-mail and exchange of some data such as a ship's position, Desch said. The next generation may have speeds up to 10M bps and provide a broadband data experience, he said. The new satellites may be able to constantly monitor environmental factors such as temperature and the level of the oceans around the world, according to Desch. They could constantly take pictures so enterprises or consumers could monitor facilities or homes anywhere in the world. And working with GPS, they could provide location accuracy down to feet or inches, he said. The next-generation system will be totally based on IP (Internet Protocol), making it easier for Iridium to take advantage of new technology advances and for enterprises to integrate services into their existing applications, according to the company. Iridium sells more data modems than handsets today, and with the next generation it hopes to bring those modems down to a single chip that can be built into more devices, Desch said. Iridium Next will gradually replace the current generation of satellites, which are expected to reach the end of their useful lives starting around 2014, Desch said. Iridium sells wholesale access to the network that is then resold by partners, Desch said. Voice calls cost end customers about US$0.80 to $1.50 per minute and data services are typically priced per packet, he said. Modems cost about $300 and handsets start at about $1,200.
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Sell it or spin it off? Motorola is considering various options to sort out its mobile phone division which lost the company $1.2bn in 2007.â¦
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Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Weyrauch said the cuts would be made worldwide &quot;to better align our work force&quot; and in anticipation of the separation of its chip operations, now operating independently as Freescale Semiconductor Inc.
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Motorola has to find a way to make cool phones that people want to buy, or else face the possibility that its mobile business will be sold off.
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(InfoWorld) - The day afterÂ announcing that 4,000 employees will be laid off, Motorola CEO Ed Zander told investors that he plans to boost profits with a wide range of multimedia handsets instead of relying on a single blockbuster product like the Razr cell phone. "We're not going to have another Razr. Every once in a while, something will pop, but there have been only three in recent years -- the Microtec, the Startec, and the Razr," Zander said Thursday in a webcast address at the Lehman Brothers Worldwide Wireless and Wireline Conference in New York. Now the company is preparing to launch products in Europe and Asia during June and July: theÂ Razr2 cell phone,Â Moto Z8 handset with a digital music player and mobile TV, Moto Q 9 mobile e-mail smartphone, and Rokr Z6, a handheld MP3 music player and cell phone. "So there are four of them, which proves we can still design some pretty wild things. But we need more of them at more price points with more geographies and more carriers," Zander said. A wider range of products will allow Motorola to focus on its twin strategies of selling low-end handsets in emerging markets such as the Middle East and southeast Asia through channel distributors and retail partners, and selling high-end handsets in Europe, China, and Japan. Zander acknowledged that competing vendors, such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, have already gotten a start in those areas, but said Motorola will catch up fast with the widespread emergence of WiMax wireless networks in the U.S. "We're still very PC-centric with MP3 over here, we're very tethered. But in Europe and Asia and even Latin America, it's more of an over-the-air experience to download music and video. Hopefully, that will change in the U.S. as we get these networks installed in the second half of 2007 and in 2008." However, Motorola faces an uphill climb to regain its lost market share, according to a study released Thursday. Nokia surged forward on mobile phone sales in China and Japan during the first quarter of 2007, padding its dominant lead over competitors, according to Gartner. The overall industry sold 257.4 million units during the first quarter, a healthy growth rate of 14 percent over the same quarter last year, despite the annual post-holiday sales slump in Western Europe and North America, Gartner said. But Nokia outperformed its rivals, claiming 35.7 percent market share for a large lead over Motorola's 18.5 percent, Samsung's 12.5 percent, Sony Ericsson's 8.4 percent, and LG Electronics' 6.2 percent. Motorola suffered from stocking its channel resellers with excess products in the first quarter, forcing them to drop prices to push the phones into end-users' hands, Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said in the report. That problem will persist through the second quarter, but the company could rebound if there is strong demand for the Razr2, she said. Zander admitted the company had been tripped up when those slowing sales threatened to overwhelm corporate overhead costs. "The last few months have been very unsettling," he said. "January and February caught us by surprise, quite frankly. We did have to pull the trigger quickly with some headcount expenses, we had to get that done quickly." The latest layoffs came just four months afterÂ Zander announced a round of 3,500 job cuts in January. Together, the layoffs will allow Motorola to save nearly $1 billion every year, giving it the flexibility to increase funding for new areas of research in the fast-changing mobile handset segment, he said. But first, Zander faces the task of reassuring workers who were shaken by the downsizing. "I'm spending the better part of this week traveling around the country talking to employees because they get nervous. We have to get back on track," he said.
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Motorola Inc , which has  recently lost cell phone market share, is introducing a mobile  device for playing live television to expand its reach in  portable consumer electronics.
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Motorola's Ron Garriques becomes the latest high-profile outsider brought in to help shake up the company.
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Motorola Inc., the world's second-largest cell phone manufacturer behind Nokia, said Wednesday that veteran executive Mike Zafirovski is resigning as president and chief operating officer at the end of the month.
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Consumers needing a cell phone or accessories on the run have a new option now that Motorola Inc. has rolled out a series of what the company calls "robotic stores."
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TOKYO Schaumburg(Illinois)-based Motorola and Japan&#39;s top mobile-phone carrier plan to develop a more sophisticated mobile phone that subscribers in Japan can use while traveling to other parts of Asia and to Europe.
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(InfoWorld) - Motorolaâs Greg Brown was channeling Winston Churchill last week when he announced his companyâs plans to take on the BlackBerry market with wireless devices for all manner of enterprise jobs. âWe will address the needs of mobile workers in the office, out in the field, in the factory, at retail, and across the supply chain,â said Brown, president of Motorolaâs network and enterprise business. Hey! What about âon the landing groundsâ? But big talk was the order of the day, as Brown tried to explain what Motorola hopes to do after it digests its $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies. Symbolâs stock and trade is handheld computers and bar-code scanners used to capture data in warehouses and factories. If you have signed for a UPS package recently, the chances are you did so on a Symbol device. Motorolaâs specialty, on the other hand, is WANs. The plan is to join the two and push more wireless data devices into all corners of the enterprise by cutting across devices, infrastructure, applications, and services, Brown said. âSymbolâs strength in capturing, moving, and managing data inside the building directly complements â¦ Motorolaâs network capabilities outside of the building,â Brown said. Motorola is already envisioning the types of products and services it will be able to offer. For example, Symbol is a leader in RFID, the short-range wireless technology that companies are just beginning to use to track products and assets. Motorola would like to expand RFIDâs reach by combining cellular, Wi-Fi, WiMax, and RFID in a way that can help enterprises track products throughout their lifecycles, spanning private networks inside offices and public networks outside, said Ed Zander, Motorolaâs chairman and chief executive. Symbol is developing wireless devices catering to various industries, such as medical, transportation, and retail. âI looked at all the devices and imagined the Wi-Fi and WiMax play,â Zander said. Motorola also sees opportunities in Symbolâs enterprise WLAN business. Symbol has deployed 45,000 such networks that will eventually need to be upgraded to higher speeds. And there are still lots of enterprises that have yet to install their first wireless networks, Zander added.
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Security and enterprise issues and services are taking new priority for the handset maker.