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Apr. 19, 2010

Earlier today, Motorola said it named Mark Shockley Senior Vice President of Global Go-to-Market for the company’s Mobile devices division.

Shockley will be responsible for overseeing all aspects of Motorola’s mobile device global sales operations.

Shockley will report to Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha.

He has been at Motorola since 1979, most recently as senior vice president and general manager for the Americas Region Go-to-Market business.

And according to a recent report from iSuppli, Motorola slipped to the No. 6 position in global wireless device shipments during the fourth quarter of last year, just behind ZTE Corp. having shipped approximately 12 million mobile devices during the final 3 months of 2009.

The American handset maker also appointed Frank Meng corporate vice president and general manager in China for its mobile devices division.

Meng will oversee all aspects of Motorola’s mobile device business in all of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Meng most recently served as corporate senior vice president of Qualcomm’s operations in China and will report to Shockley in his new position.

Motorola announced in February that it planned to split its operations in two in early 2011 with one half containing its consumer-oriented mobile devices and television set-top box division and the other focused on its enterprise business.

Jha, who previously served as COO at Qualcomm, is set to head up the consumer mobile devices and set-top box division.

The news had been largely expected for about a year, ever since the company's stock has lost more than half of its value in the last eighteen months, and as shareholders and Wall Street analysts feel that the restructuring will help the company's shares recover some of the lost ground.

The restructuring will give the company's two co-CEOs, Sanjay Jha and Greg Brown, separate companies to run.

Jha will concentrate on Motorola's entertainment and consumer-oriented devices, including smartphones like the Droid, and Brown on high-tech business and VHF communications equipment solutions.

The split will give current shareholders a share in each new company, which will be roughly the same size in terms of annual revenue at $11 billion. Both halves will be publicly traded.

"We believe that this new restructuring is more compelling for customers and investors," Brown said in an interview. "We do anticipate that both business segments will have positive operating cash flow moving forward."

The decision to split the company is a change from original plans the company announced in late 2008 to spin off only its mobile handset unit by the third quarter of last year. Motorola put that plan on hold as the recession deepened and sales deteriorated in late 2008.

Based in Schaumburg, Illinois, Motorola was flying high for a few years after introducing its wildly popular Razr flip phone in 2005, but as the phone's popularity faltered, the company struggled to develop a worthy successor and losses rapidly piled up in its cell-phone division.

Two newer phones based on Google's new Android operating system, the Cliq and the Droid, have been well received however, and Motorola said it shipped 2 million units in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Motorola's Android-based new Devour handset will go on sale early next month through Verizon Wireless.

Motorola plans to launch no less than twenty smartphones in 2010. Jha suggested that smartphones will be increasingly integrated to television set-top boxes as video is now watched on multiple devices. Jha added that Motorola's mobile-device business will be profitable in the fourth quarter of 2010.

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Source: Motorola.