Motorola embarks on new era

At the beginning of the year, industry giant Motorola officially split its long-suffering consumer mobile-phone business from its core private-communications unit that serves enterprises, governments and public safety, which is now called Motorola Solutions.

After years of being viewed as an afterthought — if not ignored altogether by some financial analysts — Motorola Solutions is “excited” about being a separate company, said Mark Moon, Motorola Solutions’ senior vice president of government and commercial markets.

“It feels like now, once and for all, we can really stand alone as a true business-critical, mission-critical, business-to-business focused company and have the industry look at us that way, not just as Motorola Inc., which sometimes was hard for investors and folks in the media to say, ‘Well, what are you really?” Moon said.

Indeed, while some financial analysts viewed the current Motorola Solutions business as the “boring” part of the business and focused almost exclusively on the trendy consumer handset division, it was the tried-and-true business/mission-critical unit that poured about $3.5 billion into helping the consumer mobility side stay afloat during rough times during the last three years, Moon said.

Now, as Motorola Solutions, the new company now needs to worry only about itself, Moon said. And the possibilities are significant for a company that has a strong cash position, he said.

“The reality is that there clearly was not the flexibility during those times [while supporting the consumer mobility unit], if we wanted to go to … make an inorganic investment or return equity to shareholders or go form another kind of strategic alliance,” Moon said. “Now, we really have the ability to do a lot of different things as we go forward.”

In addition, with enterprise spending exceeding company expectations as the U.S. economy tries to rebound and the potential for a new market with the advent of public-safety LTE networks being built on spectrum in the 700 MHz band, Moon said the North America market may not be limited to single-digit growth.

“With private LTE, North America becomes a growth market for us,” he said.

That’s a prospect that should be welcome not only at Motorola Solutions, but one that offers promise throughout the wireless industry.

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For more information on LTE, attend these sessions at IWCE in Las Vegas, March 7-11, 2011.