Greg Brown spent an hour this morning talking to investors in New York and while lots of words were spoken, and questions posed, few specifics about how Motorola plans to make its mobile device business work as a spin-off were doled out.
To be fair, a majority of the talk was devoted to Moto’s other business lines such as rugged enterprise devices, cable set-top boxes, the Symbol technology integration and its public radio segment — pretty much the business lines that make money for Motorola.
So just like a parent who tends to boast about the three kids in college over the youngest child who’s still working nights at Burger King, Brown was looking to spread good news and confidence in light of the third quarter financials coming soon.
He did kick-off his talk by mentioning how newly crowned co-CEO Sanjay Jha, who will spear head mobile device business once its spun-off next year, “will be a great partner” and that he couldn’t be “more pleased” with how his co-leader has taken to the task in the past month.
Brown was similiarly gracious about the contribution Symbol Technologies’ teams are providing to the business focus and that “Symbol is teaching Motorola” when it omes to mobile voice integration and application delivery.
Motorola sees long-term opportunities with its 3G venture but is clearly not going to step away from CDMA and GMS technologies as well, and sees 10-12 percent long-term growth going forward with its enterprise mobility segments.
While it has invested in both WiMAX and LTE technologies, Motorola believes the WiMAX investment will pay off first though “we don’t know when it will cross over into revenue growth” at tihs point.
About three quarters into the one-hour talk Brown did start talking about the impending spinoff effort that Jha will lead noting it will only happen when Motorola is confident it will sustain itself as an independent business, and that right now hundreds of people working on cross-functional teams are primarily focused on all the issues tied to the spin-off.
“This is a substantial undertaking,” and the Motorola brand will be critical to consumer mobile devices, noted Brown.
The Motorola leader spoke highly and enthusiastically about Moto’s continued partnership with Microsoft and its current Windows Mobile 6.1 mobile OS and how it’s a complimentary technology to both the consumer segment and the rugged device segment. Yet he acknowledged the importance of the many other platforms Motorola uses including Linux, Symbian and its own proprietary platform.
