Word: motorolas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even though its mobile-phone shipments grew twice as much as Nokia's or SonyEricsson's in the third quarter, Motorola is still facing huge challenges. Manufacturers in China and South Korea are hot on Motorola's tail. When they figure out (and that is when, not if) how to make phones as cool as the Razr, there's little doubt they will produce them faster and more cheaply. Motorola's stock is up 58% since Zander took over as CEO, but it has been hovering around $20 for the past four months, despite seven straight quarters of double-digit...
...investors willing to stick it out, Zander has a bold vision, one that focuses on the next decade's hot new country rather than the next quarter's hot new product. Even as Motorola continues to develop high-end phones, he is pushing the company to go after the lowest end of the spectrum: a sub-$40 phone aimed at farmers and the striving urban masses in India, several nations in Africa and, to a lesser extent, China. But he doesn't want to sell just cheap phones; he wants to transform those markets into a new base of customers...
India in particular is a high priority for Zander, who has made that country his personal project. His partner on the India team is Warrior, a 21-year veteran of Motorola who was born and educated in India. (Zander tried twice to recruit her to Sun when he was chief operating officer there, and a running joke at Motorola is that he took the CEO job just to work with her.) Instead of flooding India with cheap products, Warrior says, the company is introducing pared-down phones that share a design language with more expensive ones. They use the same...
...Motorola's advertising too is the same no matter where you go, promoting the company's most expensive, best-looking phones. Ron Garriques, who runs Motorola's mobile devices unit, says that even though sales of the Razr in India are small, its image is attracting people to Motorola's other products. "In India only about 1% of the population has the ability to afford the Razr," Garriques says. "The real pull for us is the other 1.1 billion people who can't afford a Razr." To reach them, Motorola is working with local carriers to take their phones into...
Making the broad push into emerging telecom markets will require Motorola's disparate working parts--half network infrastructure, half consumer products--to work together in a way they rarely did before Zander arrived. "The leaders of the business units would have tried to optimize the business for themselves," Rau says. Under Zander, part of senior executives' compensation is now tied to Motorola's overall performance, not just that of their own units. They meet in person more often, and each of the top 14 executives is now personally responsible for two major customers or regions. Zander won't make...