What future for the Motorola conglomerate ?

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

With declining sales results, Motorola is still in a restructuring phase. Recently, Nokia Siemens Networks was reported to be in talks with Motorola to acquire its Networks business.

What are the sizes of different entities?

Motorola has currently four businesses: Mobile Devices, Home, Enterprise Mobility Solutions and Networks.

The company is planning to separate in two independent companies, one dedicated to Mobile devices and Home businesses; the other to Enterprise Mobility and Networks businesses. For the FY 2009, these two entities had sales of respectively $11 billion and $11.1 billion, the company would be equally separated.

More specifically, this was the situation as of 2009:

-       Motorola Mobile Devices:

• 7,1bn sales and a loss of $925m.  In Revenues, Motorola ranks n°7 in the world after Nokia, Samsung, Apple, LG, RIM, Sony Ericsson according to Dataxis Quarterly mobile handset sales intelligence.  71% of sales are in the Americas and 66% in North America.

-       Motorola Home :

• 3,9bn sales and operating earning of $203m
• 82% of sales in the Americas and 71% in North America (for Q110)
• Motorola is hugely relying on its dominant position in the North America cable TV business, head-end and set to boxes, and it means it is hugely relying on a few key customers, such as Comcast, Timewarner…  The same is almost true in Latam.
• Concerning Home division, some reports talked about potential buyers such as Samsung or Huawei

-       Motorola Enterprise Mobility: 7,0bn and operating earnings of $1,1bn

-       Motorola Networks: $4,1bn and operating earnings of $484m

This division is one that Nokia Siemens could acquire.  With Huawei & ZTE progressing quickly, consolidation between historical vendors (Nokia / Siemens, Alcatel/Lucent, Nortel / Ericsson) is likely to continue with Motorola and then Japanese vendors.  NSN sales are €12,5bn or $15,6bn, 4 times Motorola. Ericsson (networks) made 17,6bn in 2009.