Word: zander
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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 revenue growth. The fear, as Merrill Lynch analyst Tal Liani explains it, is that despite the Razr's success, "in the long run, the company will face commoditization...
That kind of hand-wringing about margins gets under Zander's skin. At an investors' conference in September where he intended to promote the Rokr, he was instead peppered with questions about how the company would shore up its profit margins once sales of the Razr start to slow. At the end of the meeting, an exasperated Zander started venting to an attendee about the evils of short-term thinking on Wall Street. "I work for shareholders," he said in an interview in his Schaumburg, Ill., office three weeks later. "But, that said, are you a long-term shareholder...
...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...