Mixed financial results bag for Motorola

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Motorola must be doing something right, as the firm seems to have found a way to generate higher profits from lower revenues this quarter, mainly thanks to Droid X.
It was a good news, bad news kind of quarter for Motorola which despite higher profits and beating the Street’s estimates by a penny, also saw a dip in sales for its personal devices and home business units.
Surprisingly, Motorola’s smartphone segment also reported an operating loss – of $109 million – but managed to stay in the black thanks to a $228 million legal payment thought to be from Blackberry maker RIM.
Only Motorola’s enterprise mobility segment experienced growth, with sales of $1.9 billion, up 10% year-on-year.
Net income for the quarter was $162 million on revenue of $5.4 billion, not bad considering a year ago profits were just $26 million on revenue of $5.50 billion.

And while Motorola’s co-CEO Sanjay Jha was quick to sing the Droid and Droid X’s praises, it’s interesting that the firm reported just $1.7 billion in mobile handset sales, down 6% from last year’s Q2. Overall, Moto managed to ship out 8.3 million mobile phones in this last quarter, 2.7 of which were of the smart variety.
The Droid X, said Jha, had been “very well received,” thus far and is apparently “seen as one of the best smartphones in the market today.” Jha went on to say his firm was now in a “strong position to continue improving our share in the rapidly growing smartphone market and improving our operating performance.”
No one can accuse Motorola of not doing its level best at cost cutting, with the firm still in the midst of massive restructuring and car-boot sale style offloading of its Networks segment to Nokia-Siemens Networks for $1.2 billion.
Nevertheless, many financial analysts feel the firm’s top-line growth has yet to be consolidated and that a true turn-around won’t fully occur before Motorola can come up with a true iPhone killer.