February 6th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Smartphones & Tablets | No Comments »
Lots of news is coming from mobile phone vendors lately. Negative results and rumours from Motorola as well as from Leonovo.
Kicking off with Leonovo, the company has chosen to sell it’s mobile phone business to a couple of private equity firms. The company received $100 million in return. Leonovo is the number 4 vendor of mobile phones in China, while the company did never get much space outside of that market. Mobile phones represented 2% of Leonovo’s business.
After some analysts saying that it might be interesting for Motorola to sell of their mobile phone division (and so their core business), rumours became heavy that Motorola was indeed looking into this possibility to get the company ready for the coming years.
On Monday, some news sources came with the news that Ericsson is interested in buying Motorola’s phone business. While Ericsson started off on the market by itself, it merged with Sony to set up SonyEricsson, in order to increase market share. SonyEricsson has been mostly producing Sony like devices, incorporating Sony brands like Cybershot, Bravia and Walkman (still no news on playstation). If Ericsson would buy the Motorola division, it could mean that Ericsson will return on the market by itself, or that Motorola technologies and designs will be taken up into the SonyEricsson division.
Currently, Motorola owns the rights to UIQ together with SonyEricsson. Also, Motorola has experience in producing phones for UIQ as well as Linux. A few years ago, Motorola already acquired Sendo, a company that made Series 60 devices.
If SonyEricsson would acquire Motorola’s cellphone division, that could mean that SonyEricsson could become Nokia’s biggest competitor. The joint market share would be 35%, while Nokia owns 40%.
Last Tuesday however, it became clear that none of the above might happen to Motorola. Motorola’s cellphone division will be led directly by CEO Greg Brown. There is no news about the new strategy, but it is expected that the R&D department will probably be stimulated to find a successor to the Motorola RAZR.
