Word: motorolas
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...however, see a lack of fire. After a few disappointing quarters, some product misfires and layoffs that cut 60,000 employees, the company had become "gun-shy," Zander says. When he arrived in January 2004, he set out to change Motorola from the inside out--turning an engineer's company into a design powerhouse, an American icon into a global player and Motorola's conservative culture into one that embraces risk. As Zander puts it, "You gotta celebrate taking a swing...
...emblem of Zander's vision for a new Motorola--one that marries innovative engineering with bold design and marketing--is the Razr. Nearly a year after the wafer-thin phone was launched, sales are still accelerating. Motorola sold 6.5 million Razrs in the third quarter of 2005. In that period, the Razr accounted for 1 in 25 phones sold by any major carrier. The Razr is on track to surpass the best-selling phone of all time, Motorola's StarTAC. If that phone, the world's first clamshell, was Motorola at its geek-chic best, the Razr is just chic...
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...