Motorola ships 14.8 million handsets in second quarter

Motorola today reported second quarter earnings of $26 million dollars. In its Mobile Devices division, the company shipped out 14.8 million handsets during the three months, a slight improvement from the 14.7 million shipped in the first quarter, but just over half the number of units sent out in last year's period. The mobile division had revenue of $1.8 billion dollars, but still had to use red ink on the books to report a loss of $253 million dollars. With a 5.5% market share, Motorola is the world's fourth largest cellphone manufacturer, slightly ahead of the Sony Ericsson joint venture, but trailing Nokia, Samsung and LG.

Motorola's turnaround plan is based on producing smartphones running Google's open source Android OS. The Schaumburg, Illinois based firm says that by the holidays, it will have two Android based models at two U.S. carriers and multiple carriers overseas. While the U.S. carriers were not named, we recently reported that by this years' fourth quarter, Verizon is expected to have a Motorola produced smartphone that will run the Android OS. The manufacturer's co-CEO, Sanjay Jha, said that the two Stateside Android devices will be running on competing technologies which would point to AT&T or T-Mobile as the second carrier.

Jha was brought in to Motorola last year with the intention of spinning off and leading the cellphone division as an independent company. He says that the plan, which was delayed when the recession took hold and handset sales dropped, will still be implemented when business improves. The exec also said that he expects the cellphone division to have a break-even quarter some time next year, but would not promise such an event for the whole year.

source: YahooFinance