Moto Drops To 6.5 Percent of Cell Phone Market

Ed Sutherland ()

Moto Drops To 6.5 Percent of Cell Phone MarketTroubled cell phone maker Motorola Tuesday announced its shipments were cut in half during the fall, its marketshare falling to 6.5 percent.

The Schaumburg, Ill.-based company said it shipped 19.2 million phones during the December quarter, a 47 percent decline from nearly 41 million handsets sold during the same period in 2007.

As a result, the company posted a $3.6 billion quarterly loss highlighted by continued bleeding by its Mobile Devices group. Motorola said the group ended the December quarter down $595 million. The handset area lost $388 million during the same period a year ago.

The glum financial news was marked by naming its comptroller Edward J. Fitzpatrick as acting chief financial officer, replacing CFO Paul J. Liska.

Motorola head Greg Brown thanked Liska for his role in recent job cuts and other cost-saving measures.

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Ed Sutherland

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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  • Mark

    Perhaps if their products weren’t so clunky, they’d do better. The Razr was a great form factor, but the OS was simply horrible, unless, like me, you were prepared to spend a day reorganising it so you had shortcuts to minimise the amount of interaction you needed to do to achieve something basic. Even the shortest of texts was a trial compared to a Nokia contemporary. I still have my Razr, and I do still have a bit of a soft spot for it because it looked great and wasd a really well-built, tactile handset, but I was so glad to go back to a Nokia interface after about nine months. Now, I have an iPhone, and of course, that’s a whole new ballgame. Moto have a LOT of work to do.