Tom Meredith

Another Motorola executive departs

Lynnette Luna — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:38:04 -0400

Another Motorola executive has departed from the company. Rich Nottenburg, chief strategy and technology officer, is the latest executive to leave amid investor Carl Icahn's activist ways to shake up the Motorola board. Nottenburg's departure follows the replacements of CEO Ed Zander in January, acting CFO Tom Meredith in February along with mobile devices head Stu Reed, Casey Keller, head of marketing, treasurer Steve Strobel and EMEA mobile-devices head Mike Fenger. Dan Moloney, who leads the company's home and networks mobility business, will replace Nottenburg.

Motorola's financial woes continue, with the operator announcing last month that first-quarter losses reached $194 million. Motorola is splitting into two publicly traded companies, one of which is the handset business and the other being the networks business. But analysts don't believe that move will solve the company's problems any time soon. Moreover, LG is closing in on Motorola's worldwide mobile phone market share. LG's market share ratcheted up to 8.6 percent in the first quarter, up from 6.4 percent in the year-ago quarter. Shipments of phones increased year-on-year a sizeable 54 percent during the first quarter.

To find out more about Motorola's latest executive departure:
- check out this CNET article

Motorola hires Liska as new CFO

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:59:58 -0500

Motorola hired Paul Liska as its new chief financial officer. Liska takes over for Tom Meredith who served as the interim CFO during the past few months. Meredith will remain on the company's board, according to CEO Greg Brown.

The new CFO is tasked with managing costs while the company's handset business continues to slide as well as help structure a joint venture for networking technologies with Nortel Networks. Liska's appointment marks only the latest executive change at Motorola since Brown took the helm of the company last month. Since then CTO Padmasree Warrior left the company for the CTO post at Cisco and the head of human resources departed as well. Brown has known Liska for about ten years, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

For more on Liska:
- read this press release
- read this article from the WSJ

Emerging markets boost Nokia

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:59:55 -0500

Nokia's strong fourth quarter was partly thanks to its market dominance in key emerging markets like China, India, the Middle East and Africa. Nokia sold a record 133.5 million phones during the quarter, while Motorola's handset sales fell 38 percent during the same period. Nokia said it saw the strongest growth in the Middle East and Africa, where shipments were up 52.3 percent, while sales grew in APAC and China as well. Sales in North America and other mature markets, however, slid during the quarter. Nokia is beating its competitors because it's in a better position to scale its products, and Motorola took note of that:

"We need to be not so much a producer of volume to get scale," said Motorola CFO Tom Meredith. "We've got to produce the right design point with the right features and functionality at the right cost. And if we do that, scale will be less of an obstacle than it is perhaps today."

For more on Nokia's emerging market dominance:
- read this article from CNET

Wall Street hums Zander's swan song

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:59:58 -0400

Analysts on Wall Street are clamoring over speculation that Motorola's CEO Ed Zander could be on his way out: Motorola's stock price rose almost 3 percent during the hours preceding the company's call about poor sales. Investors were bullish because they thought an ouster was coming, according to reports. As we noted yesterday, Motorola announced that its preliminary estimates of second-quarter sales will be in the range of $8.6 billion to $8.7 billion. The firm had estimated that second-quarter sales would be flat with first-quarter 2007 sales of $9.4 billion.

Some of the hubbub surrounding the Zander ouster rumors is attributable to activist investor Eric Jackson, who published a statement online called "Motorola Plan-B," which calls for the CEO's dismissal or resignation. Motorola's response to the speculation: "The current management team--[CEO] Ed [Zander], COO Greg Brown, and CFO Tom Meredith--are working on restoring profitability for mobile devices and moving forward with a strategy to fix the business."

For more on the speculation:
- read this BusinessWeek article