Troubled 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.
Motorola’s slumping marketshare means the cell phone maker falls to fifth place behind Sony Ericsson and LG. In late 2008, Apple’s iPhone dethroned Motorola’s iconic RAZR as the most popular U.S. handset.
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.
