Motorola takes last place among the big five phonemakers

By Scott Moritz

Motorola, the flailing No. 3 mobile phone maker, is dropping like a lead handset in industry rankings.

Skipping the No.4 slot, Motorola (MOT) is set to land at the back of the pack at No. 5, according to second quarter shipment numbers. Motorola shipped between an estimated 22 million and 23 million phones in the second quarter, say industry sources cited in a DigiTimes story Thursday. Those numbers compare with projections for 28.1 million phones shipped by LG and 24 million units from Sony Ericsson. Nokia (NOK) and Samsung are No. 1 and No. 2.

The stunning freefall in sales is happening at a faster clip than many observers expected. In March, Fortune.com reported that if Motorola’s weak sales trends continued, the Schaumburg, Ill.-based tech titan could fall to fourth place by year end.

Without any compelling new phones to followup on the Razr’s success, Motorola has been in free fall the past two years. The once-profitable handset unit, and formerly Motorola’s strongest business, lost half its marketshare since 2006 and plunged into the red. Earlier this year, Motorola announced plans to cut its losses and spin off its phone business. Even a recent headhunting mission to find a new CEO turned somewhat laughable when the targeted Hewlett-Packard executive announced that he was quite happy in his current job.

Motorola is expected to report second quarter results on July 31.

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Filed under Gadgets, Hewlett-Packard, LG, Mobile, Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, iphone

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Motorola was ran into the ground by Bob Galvin’s son and grandson with their long and unsuccessful list of pets products over the last 20 years. The most deadly was the concept of Digital 6 Sigma, which transform techical decision making from does it “work” to “do I have enought boxes check.”

The underlying problem is that they been going down the same path of project management for so long, they firmly believe they doing the right thing.

It a sad state of affair for a company, when a large number of the employees are consider being “the lucky ones” by their peers and themselves when they get laid off.

Posted By -ex Motorola employee, Northern Illinois : August 4, 2008 5:15 pm

Motorola has remained firmly a hardware company in an age of “software”. To succeed they need to cut the hardware engineers by 65 % or so and hire overall system and software designers. This is the age of software. Currently as soon as they get to the point of “we have nice hardware” the staff (being hardware focused, stop – and put out hardwre with weak sofware a both a system and handset level. They did try with software centers but the software centers were hampered by the toal control by hardware focused leadership. That’s my view.

Posted By de_magnete, adelaide, south australia : July 22, 2008 1:49 pm

Moto pays for lots of strategic errors by stupid managers for years.

Posted By Jack New York US : July 14, 2008 6:24 am

They deserve it. Sat on their butts for years making RAZR variations that sell for nearly as much as the iPhone & 2x most other phones. Nothing great from them. You Snooze you lose!

Posted By reman, WPB FL : July 11, 2008 12:00 pm

Why China Mobile did not consider buy out Motorola – fire all these stupid CEO, excutives and replace with smart professionals, get MOTOROLA back on No. 1 position.

Posted By Motorola Fans, Hong Kong, China : July 11, 2008 10:04 am

For a company that has led the way for years, the results in the last five years has been disgusting and getting worse!

Where has that proud company that Bob Galvin started gone!

Posted By Art Jones (Motorola Retired) Ontario, Canada : July 10, 2008 5:15 pm

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