Motorola (NYSE:MOT) welcomed back Dan Moloney into the corporate fold, less than six months after the company's former set-top box chief left the firm.
The company said Moloney, a 10-year company veteran, will take over as the president of Motorola Mobility beginning Sept. 1 and will report to Moto co-CEO Sanjay Jha. He will be in charge of the company's set-top box unit; Motorola Mobility will include both that division and the handset unit when it becomes its own publicly traded company early next year. Moloney will help launch the new company and also will run the supply chain, information technology and government affairs components of Motorola Mobility.
Moloney left Motorola in February to become the CEO of Technitrol, an electronics-component manufacturer. Motorola said Moloney is returning because his new job will offer him more responsibilities than his old Moto position as the head of Motorola's Home and Networks unit. Nokia Siemens Networks agreed last month to buy Motorola's wireless networks division for $1.2 billion.
Since Motorola announced its separation plans in February, the company has been moving to get all of the pieces in place for the transition. In June, Motorola named John Bucher, a former equity research analyst focused on communication technology, as its point man for strategy for its mobile devices and set-top box divisions, tasked with pushing Moto's smartphone turnaround. Motorola also is buying back most of its debt and diverting cash to the handset unit; Jha said last month that when Motorola Mobility launches it will have no debt.
Additionally, the company is dropping clues about what kind of products it might produce through the combination of its handset unit and its set-top box division. The company filed a trademark application for something called "Family Room" with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that strongly hints at media sharing products.
Motorola reported a net profit of $162 million in the second quarter, up from its $26 million profit in the year-ago period. On a company-wide basis, Motorola's sales were $5.4 billion in the quarter, down slightly from the year-ago period
For more:
- see this Reuters article
- see this Chicago Sun-Times article
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