Why did Motorola lose the phone market?

Running head: BUSINESS DECISION ANALYTICS
Business Decision Analytics
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BUSINESS DECISION ANALYTICS
Research topic: Why did Motorola lose the phone market?
Organizational context and background
Motorola Inc. is one of the oldest American multinational companies operating in the
telecommunications industry. The company was established in 1928 in Schaumburg, Illinois. It
lost around $4.3 billion within 2007 and 2009, and to recover from the loss, Motorola Inc. was
divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility. The
section Motorola Mobility was sold to Google in 2012 and it was further acquired by Lenovo in
2014 (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2019). Motorola was the first company to launch mobile phones
in the world market yet over the years in a strong competitive mobile market, Motorola lost its
grip. The portable wireless telephone handset of Motorola was a pioneer in the world of cellular
telephones, in which the first model, DynaTAC 8000X, was launched in 1983. The flip phone,
Razr was the first cellular foldable handset was launched by Motorola in 2004. The major
competitor of Motorola was Nokia in the mobile phone industry. Nokia knocked off Motorola
from the position of largest cellular phone manufacturer in the world in 1998 (Linge, 2016).
However, both these companies lost their market share while competing with the smartphone
manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Xiomi etc. (Lamberg et al., 2019). Motorola
tried to recover its position in the market by selling itself to Google first and then to Lenovo, but
the attempt still failed.
Research problem
The problem issue that this study aims to explore is the reasons for which Motorola,
despite being the pioneer in the portable cellular mobile handset manufacturing, failed to
maintain its position in the mobile phone manufacturing industry.