MWC: Everybody keeps writing Motorola off
Rating: Alcatel says the Chinese are coming
Talk about kicking a man when he’s down, a favourite pastime @ MWC is predicting the imminent demise of Motorola’s handset division. Today it was the turn of Dr Fei Liu, CEO with Alcatel/TCL.
He reckons that a Chinese manufacturer will soon join the Top Five handset vendors and singled out Motorola in particular as being a likely loser.
This is all wishful thinking, of course. TCL itself is only planning to sell 18 million handsets in 2008. But it has raised interesting questions as to the fate of Motorola’s handset operations.
Most people believe it will have to be sold off. But who would buy it? The memory of the Siemens/BenQ demise haunts most observers. That needn’t prove the case with Motorola.
After all, Alcatel Mobile phones is the successful amalgamation of French expertise and Chinese manufacturing know-how and the company has turned itself around.
The best fit I can see with Motorola is Taiwan’s HTC. The latter is a highly successful smartphone vendor and Motorola would provide it with a full handset portfolio.
However, friends here at MWC say that a merger with another American company would work best. So the infrastructure part would hook up with Nortel and the mobile phone division with Dell. After all, Dell is into PDAs and it knows a lot about volume production.
This is pure speculation and Motorola could quite conceivably just turn itself around. Sadly most people seem to agree that no amount of boardroom changes – without outside help – will be sufficient to put the handset business back on track.
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