Motorola Mobility Closes Out Q4 2011 With An $80 Million Net Loss

Motorola Mobility released their fourth quarter and year-end financials today, and now we can see why they made it a point earlier this month to downplay analyst expectations. The company’s new figures reveal that while Motorola raked in $3.4 billion in Q4 2011, they also incurred a net loss of $80 million.
Things don’t look much more promising when we shift our attention to their mobile offerings. Motorola’s myriad mobile devices accounted for the lion’s share of their revenue — $2.5 billion to be precise, a year-over-year increase of 5%.
Still, despite pushing out devices like the Droid RAZR and their XYBOARD tablet in time for the holidays, Motorola didn’t see a notable jump over their performance last quarter when during which their mobile devices netted $2.4 billion in revenue.
Also interesting to see is how Motorola stacks up to their mobile competitors when it comes to device shipments. Motorola announced earlier this month that they shipped 10.5 million mobile devices in Q4 2011, down from 11.3 million back in Q4 2010. Of those 10.5 million units shipped 5.3 million were smartphones, which doesn’t sound too shabby until you realize that Android-loving rival Samsungsold 35 million smartphones.
Taiwan-based HTC would probably be the closest in terms of performance — while they didn’t release specific device numbers along with their unaudited quarterly results, Bloomberg’s estimates pegged them at roughly 10 million devices shipped. Coincidentally, both Motorola and HTC have made known their intentions to streamline their smartphone portfolios going forward, and I’m looking forward to seeing how their earnings change as a result.
Stepping back to look at their yearly performance, we find that Motorola Mobility shipped a grand total of 42.4 million mobile devices, which includes 18.7 million smartphones and 1 million tablets. Those in tandem with their (less interesting) home segment offerings led Motorola to pick up net revenues of $13.1 billion, albeit with a net loss of $249 million. Of course, Motorola Mobility’s on the precipice of some drastic change, what with their pending acquisition by Google still churning along. With the transaction expected to finish early this year, we could be looking at a completely different Motorola before too long.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/motorola-mobility-closes-out-q4-2011-with-an-80-million-net-loss/