Motorola plans to split early next year
12 Feb 2010
Motorola, maker of the first cellular phone in 1983, is going ahead with its 2009 plan of splitting the company into two publicly traded companies and said yesterday that it has targeted to do so in the first quarter of 2011.
The once undisputed technology giant, which enabled Neil Armstrong's famous words, ''one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" to be communicated from the Moon on a Motorola radio, will split the company into two by combining its mobile devices division with the cable set-top box business as one company, and combining its enterprise mobility solutions and networks businesses, as the other.
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| Dr Sanjay Jha |
The other co-chief executive officer of Motorola, Greg Brown, will be the CEO of Motorola's enterprise mobility solutions and networks businesses, effective immediately.
The Schaumburg, Illinois-based Motorola had announced plans in 2008 of splitting the phone unit from the rest of the company by the third quarter of 2009, (See: Motorola explores three-way split) but was forced to put the plan on hold since all its three major divisions, mobile devices, enterprise mobility, and home and networks mobility, were struggling and running into huge losses with the onset of recession. (See: Motorola skips dividend amid $3.6 billion loss)
Facing intense competition from Cisco System, Hewlett-Packard and others, Motorola was seeking at that time to sell its most profitable home and networks mobility division, which makes television set-top boxes and networking gear, but failed to attract a buyer who would pay around $4 billion to $5 billion that it was expecting.
