Who wants to buy Motorola’s mobile phone business?

by billso on Monday, 18 February 2008

Motorola announced last month that it wants to sell its mobile phone unit, which is ranked third in global mar­ket share, accord­ing to Engad­get.

No one’s buy­ing. This month, sev­eral com­pa­nies includ­ing Sam­sung and Dell have announced that they are not inter­ested in lay­ing out US$9 to 12 bil­lion for the business.

It’s a bit of a shock. The Motorola brand name is well known, and the com­pany has remained com­pet­i­tive. Cer­tainly some up-and-coming man­u­fac­turer would want that name­plate! It’s the kind of play that made sense a few years ago, when Chi­nese man­u­fac­turer Lenovo pur­chased IBM’s per­sonal com­puter busi­ness, includ­ing the ThinkPad name.

Motorola exec­u­tives backpedaled last week at the Mobile World Con­gress, announc­ing that the com­pany remains com­mit­ted to the mobile hand­set industry.

Last Mon­day, Microsoft pur­chased Dan­ger, the devel­oper of T-Mobile’s Side­kick line. Om Malik esti­mated that Microsoft paid US$500 mil­lion for a mobile hand­set line that has a decent mar­ket share among the under-30 crowd.

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Tagged as: ceo, Dell, EU, Microsoft, mobile, Motorola, Samsung, Sidekick, T-Mobile

  • http://www.atypicalliving.com atyp­i­cal­liv­ing

    Like you said, this would have made sense in 2004, when Moto dropped the best sell­ing, hand­set in the world, the RAZR.

    Then… they released one for every car­rier, and that went over well.

    Then… they released like 50 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of it.

    Then came the Moto ROKR, sig­nal­ing the begin­ning of the end.

    Then the shoddy qual­ity of the remain­ing releases in the line (PEBL, etc.)

    Then the whole mess with the Side­kick Slide bat­tery. Moto’s fall from grace is only equaled in utter crap­pi­tude by Chevy Chase’s fall from superstardom.

    Fletch = orig­i­nal StarTAC

    Both are great works of art, ahead of it’s time, still pined for (as is evi­dent by Kevin Smith try­ing to get the Fletch fran­chise going again) and, unfor­tu­nately, can never be duplicated.

    Moto fell off hard, but if some­one can revive them the same way Lenovo redid the ThinkPad, then there’s hope for them still.

  • http://billso.com billso

    Motorola has dropped far too many balls lately. Their design team can do good work, but their mar­ket­ing peo­ple are a liability.

    Apple had a good idea – make one ver­sion of the iPhone.

    Motorola tried to please every car­rier in every pos­si­ble way. Now the car­ri­ers can­not give Motorola phones away.

    Are they still talk­ing up Zach Braff for the Fletch reboot? At this rate, they may as well cast Zac Efron as our favorite inves­tiga­tive reporter.

  • http://billso.com billso

    From today’sBusi­ness Week: if Motorola can­not sell its mobile hand­set busi­ness, the only alter­na­tive is to keep the unit and fix it. Time’s a-wasting.

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