Motorola Takes on Water Losing $285M Selling Phones in 2011

[cereal killer]

Investors already knew that Q4 was going to be a rough quarter, and when Thursdays numbers arrived, they surely lived up to those expectations. Motorola Mobility recorded an operating loss of $285 million for the year, and an operating loss of $70 million in the fourth quarter. To add insult to injury Motorola didn’t make any money selling phones last year either, they actually lost $70 million for the full year. It must be said that those totals include sales of regular feature phones, not just smartphones. Feature phones are still a big part of Motorola’s overall business model. They did sell slightly more smartphones over the previous year, coming in at 5.3 million units, up from 4.9 million units a year ago. In all, the company sold 10.5 million mobile devices in the fourth quarter and 42.4 million devices for the year.

Nokia and HTC find themselves in the same boat in regards to reporting losses and are in the process of shaking things up, we'll have to see what Googorola has ups its sleeves in the coming months.

[jerkwad]

Stop encrypting your boot-loader partition, provide timely updates, get rid of the horrible pentile screens, stop releasing 1,000 phones each year (and causing more confusion to consumers), stop pissing off current motorola owners with the "improved version" later on (and just release the product as it SHOULD have been), blah blah blah, get ICS on your phones ASAP...then MAYBE people will start taking you guys serious again and buy your phonez!

*take breath*

i'm actually VERY happy to see this for motorola - this MIGHT actually jump start a change in how they operate and how they develop/market/etc. I know I would be looking at every option to chip away at that $285 million loss.

[alboboy10]

Stop encrypting your boot-loader partition, provide timely updates, get rid of the horrible pentile screens, stop releasing 1,000 phones each year (and causing more confusion to consumers), stop pissing off current motorola owners with the "improved version" later on (and just release the product as it SHOULD have been), blah blah blah, get ICS on your phones ASAP...then MAYBE people will start taking you guys serious again and buy your phonez!

*take breath*

i'm actually VERY happy to see this for motorola - this MIGHT actually kickstart a change in how they operate and how they develop/market/etc. I know I would be looking at every option to chip away at that $285 million loss.

I agree. I used to love Motorola but I feel like they took a lot of steps in the wrong direction. Hopefully that'll change now that Google took over.

[kodiak799]

Fascinating. Now we know why both Moto and HTC have said they will slow the release of phones. Clearly a key driver is the short shelf life of the models (partly their own doing) is not enough to recover development costs. Chalk that up to another superior advantage of the Apple model.

[jerkwad]

Fascinating. Now we know why both Moto and HTC have said they will slow the release of phones. Clearly a key driver is the short shelf life of the models (partly their own doing) is not enough to recover development costs. Chalk that up to another superior advantage of the Apple model.

that's an excellent point! slow down, perfect your product, concentrate your efforts on updates/patches/feature updates for fewer devices and "wow" people with quality instead of "omg they have THREE RAZR colors now".

[kodiak799]

Unlock your bootloader and make work with developers to make it incredibly easy to flash roms. Then you've just outsourced - for basically free - support and updates while improving the overall user experience.

I mean, MS doesn't give upgrade you for free when they roll out a new version of Windows. Yeah, they update patches and fixes, but neither they nor the PC makers actually support or provide OS upgrades.

[nic8612]

Ugh, this isn't big news OR a sign of anything bad. Companies plan to operate on losses all the time in order to upgrade infrastructure, new R&D, etc. Since Google now owns Moto, there is no telling what costs Google has allocated to Moto's books. The real reason Netflix came under fire last year was because they tried to split into Netflix and Quikster to offset losses onto the Quikster brand and protect Netflix stocks. This is nothing new to anyone who knows anything about business. Unless you include where the figures come from and where the actual losses are recorded, focus your time on reporting something that matters please.

[xsylus]

Maybe if they stopped locking the boot loader and stopped investing (wasting) time and money on MotoBlur they wouldn't be losing money. Hey Motorola how about giving the smartphone consumers what they want then maybe they'll actually buy your products. DUH!

[syndicate0017]

The locked bootloader has very little to do with their losses. Even if they did change their stance and unlock the bootloader, that *might* recoup about 5% of the losses they've experienced. They definitely do need to slow the release of their phones though. They've been pissing off the consumer for a long time and now that they see that they're really hurting themselves even more so, they'll finally slow production.

[pinoy_92]

i blame in on their marketing strategy. releasing almost the same phone on a short amount of time is definitely not a good marketing strategy. motorola should have known better.