Motorola to Spin Off Its Mobile Phone Division

Telecommunications solutions provider Motorola seems determined to separate its mobile phones division from the rest of the company at a certain point in the future. The company, which cut a large number of jobs from its handset business at the beginning of this year, is said to be already considering the implications on its intellectual property and on its brand that the spin off might have.

According to a recent article on FierceWireless, the words on the separation come from the company's co-CEO Greg Brown, who is in charge with Big M's home and networks business and with its enterprise mobility segment. According to him, the separation would be a “strategy of record.” However, it should also be noted that his sayings come not too long after the company has been rumored to plan selling its home and networks business, and that it has priced it at $4.5 billion.

On the other hand, Brown said at a recent analyst conference that the prospects for the company's home and networks division are quite strong, yet he didn't comment on the speculations. “The brand is very important to both,” Brown said, referring to the two divisions of the company: mobile devices and home and networks.

“Analysts were perplexed on speculation that Motorola might be shopping its home and networks business, noting that it might be too soon to consider such a move since Motorola's mobile devices business, which has bet heavily on Google's Android platform, has not yet recovered its footing. Motorola for more than a year has voiced the possibility of spinning off its handset business. Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha, who runs the handset division, said a spin off would be timed on the business' performance and the overall economic environment,” the article on FierceWireless continues.

Motorola has had a rather bad year 2009, yet it managed to deliver to the market some competitive devices, among which we can mention the Android-powered Motorola DROID and Motorola CLIQ, both of which are already available on the European market too. Moreover, the company has announced that it plans on increasing the number of Android handsets it will release on the market in 2010, and some voices suggest that the handset vendor will launch a total number of 20 phones in 2010, running under more than one OS.