Motorola Mulls Selling Off Phone Business

A couple years ago, Motorola's handset business - led by the RAZR - was the envy of the industry; now, the company is considering selling it off.

It wasn’t so long ago that Motorola’s mobile phone business—anchored by the company’s popular RAZR handset—was the envy of the industry. Now, however, the electronics giant finds its mobile phones operations have tkane a third place behind Nokia and Samsung, falling to a 13 percent share of the worldwide market in thhe third quarter of 2007, down from 21 percent in the same quarter of 2006. In fact, things have gotten so bad that Motorola is apparently considering a drastic move: selling off its mobile devices business altogether.

"All of our businesses have exceptional people, products, and intellectual property and the ability to achieve category leadership in their markets," said Motorola’s CEO and president Greg Brown, in a statement. "We are exploring ways in which our Mobile Devices Business can accelerate its recovery and retain and attract talent while enabling our shareholders to realize the value of this great franchise."

The announcement doesn’t mean that Motorola will necessarily sell off the business, but as a publicly held company, the job of Brown and the Motorola board is, in fact, to maximize the value of the company to investors. And the mobile unit hasn’t been pulling its weight lately: during fourth quarter financial results announced last week, Motorola revealed its mobile business had lost $388 million on total revenue of $4.8 billion. That’s still a lot of dollars changing hands, but the year before, the mobile unit had earned over $340 million on revenue of $7.8 billion.