What do you do when your company's fourth-quarter profits were down $3.6 billion? You talk up how bright the future's going to be.
And that's just what Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha did this week did in discussing his Q4 report.
On the year, Moto sales totaled $30.1 million for a net loss of $2.4 billion. And they're expecting a loss of between $250 million and $300 million for the first quarter of 2009. Them's a lot of millions and billions.
On the mobile side, from Cellular-News.com:
Mobile Devices segment sales were $2.35 billion, down 51 percent compared with the year-ago quarter. For the full year 2008, sales were $12.1 billion, a 36 percent decrease compared to 2007, and the segment incurred an operating loss of $2.2 billion, compared to an operating loss of $1.2 billion in 2007.
During the quarter, the Company shipped 19.2 million handsets and estimates its share of the global handset market was 6.5 percent.
Talking about losing billions and billions of dollars is enough to loosen anyone's lips, and Jha also spoke about plans for the next year or so. [via Electronista] Mainly, Android's the deal for 2009, and we'll pick back up with Windows Mobile in 2010. OK, Moto. We'll play your waiting game. (What other choice do we have?)
Comments
Change of plans? I thought they were releasing a 6.5 handset this year.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2333601,00.asp
Wouldn't expect too much more than that, though.
I'm sorry!
A cross-eyed peacock does not look like "Next Hotness" to me!
That bird is rockin'! Second only to the Terminator Fennec.
Actually, it's a Grey Crowned Crane....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Crowned_Crane
I stand corrected!
Beautiful bird!
Lousy branding - though perhaps the species has meaning in another culture than mine.
Apart from the perception of a known "name" abandoning WM why exactly would Motorola be missed? They havent made any decent WM devices recently and have been moving steadily towards oblivion for quite a while. Would they really be missed? Personally Toshiba's reentry into the smartphone market with their new device is more exciting to me, with some nice touches based on the included accelerometer.
it is obvious you are speaking from an american perspective ... where the last release was the Q9 or Q11 ... jan 2009 saw a decent moto winmo device released in china.
Makes sense Moto is going with Android because it's free. No licensing fees as with WM. HOWEVER, what should be interesting is to see what MS does once it gets its cloud computing services running. Android is free; Symbian S60 is free. If MS gets cloud computing going, they can do like Google and give the OS away for free while making money on usage of Azure.
That's what I'd like to see at least.
literally, there is just one handful of winmo 6.x (i believe x=1) moto devices in 2009. didnt they release one in china in jan 2009?