Well it looks like Motorola Mobility is continuing to struggle. Of course it’s hard not to struggle when you didn’t announce or release any new devices in the past quarter and a half. Since Google finished the Motorola acquisition, Motorola has been losing money like crazy. And Q1 2013 seems to be no different.
A year ago, Motorola posted it’s last earnings as an independent company. In which they posted $86 million in losses. In Q4 2012, Motorola reported $353 million in total losses. Going to Q1 2013, Motorola did bring in $1.02 billion in revenue, which is down from $3.08 billion the year before. Also down from $1.51 billion in Q4 2012. An analyst from BGC, Colin Gillis, had estimated that Motorola’s Q1 sales of $1.37 billion for Motorola, which he called “Weak” in a note earlier this week.
Motorola’s recent results have been heavily impacted by Google’s decision to sell the home set-top box portion of Motorola to Arris Group for $2.35 billion in cash and stock. Because of that sale, Google moved the results to its discontinued business section.
Back in 2011, Google had reached a deal with Motorola to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Since then, Google/Motorola has yet to release any products. Google has said many times that they are dealing with an 18-month pipeline of devices that they must work through first. Which seems plausible since you don’t make a brand new phone overnight. Just this week, at AllThingsD: Dive into Mobile, Eric Schmidt was quoted as calling Motorola’s new products as “phenomenal” and noted that we should wait and see what Motorola has in store because these devices are “very, very impressive”.
Every quarter it seems like we are crossing our fingers and hoping that Motorola can somehow turn a profit, even though the last devices they released were the Droid Razr M, Droid Razr HD, and Droid Razr Maxx HD in the US. Internationally they released the Droid Razr i in the fall of 2012. We’re hoping that these “phenomenal” devices Motorola supposedly has up their sleeves come out soon and are truly phenomenal.