Motorola To Split Into Two Companies

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Yesterday, the company that invented mobile phones, Motorola, announced that they were going to split the company into two, smaller ones in order to divide the company into “smaller, more focused operations”. Motorola is said to be doing well, as it made $22 billion last year in revenue.

Motorola will be split into two companies, one will continue to make the mobile phone handsets and set-top boxes. The other will be more enterprise-orientated, as they’ll produce wireless networking products and enterprise-grade radio systems. Current CEO Sanjay Jha will run the consumer company while executive Greg Brown will become new CEO of the enterprise company.

The consumer company will retain all the Motorola name and trademarks and will license them back to the enterprise company, which leads us to believe that they’ll both be called Motorola, or some variation of that. At the press conference, the company revealed that both “halves” of Motorola have been successful, and each evenly contributed half to the company’s $22 billion in revenue last year.

It’s no secret that Motorola did poorly in the last five years as it’s once popular Razr cell phone line started to fizzle out in sales. The company turned to Android with its Motorola Droid, which is one of the more popular Android phones. Sanjay Jha credited Android for the turnaround of Motorola’s consumer cell phone business.

Jha told the New York Times that both companies have improved their balance sheets and will be able to stand alone and estimates they will both be profitable.

How does this affect your favorite upcoming Motorola tech gadget? Hopefully it won’t. It sounds like this split has been planned for a while and both ‘halves’ are said to be financially healthy.