Motorola Mobility

Motorola Mobility shuts down

Motorola had announced that it was shutting shop in India. In what has come as another nail in the coffin for Motorola Mobility in India, the company has now shut down its website, marking the end of its India operations.

If one happens to mosey over to the Motorola website, and tries to enter it, one is greeted with the text, "Important message to our customers in India".The message reads, “We are streamlining our business and support systems, and unfortunately, we'll no longer have a dedicated website for India. Your local support site will remain open well into the future, and we'll continue to provide support for our existing products. If you are interested in viewing our current products, you can still do so here.”

This shows that Motorola’s affair with India has come to a close, and in all likelihood, we may not see any new products from the brand in India. This will come as some horrible news to those who have been followers of the brand and have opted for its handsets.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in May this year. Motorola Mobility, which separated from the now-independent Motorola Solutions experienced heavy losses last year. Google said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, "These changes are designed to return Motorola's mobile devices unit to profitability, after it lost money in fourteen of the last sixteen quarters.”

In August, Motorola Mobility had announced that it will do away with about 40 percent of its vice presidents. The job cuts were forecast to set Google back by $275 million in severance-related charges. As per a report by The New York Times, the move was one of the first steps by Google to reinvent loss-making Motorola, to augment the Android platform, and expand beyond just search and software into hardware manufacturing. Reportedly, the mobile manufacturer has lost $233 million in its first six weeks under Google.

The New York Times reported that one-third of the 4,000 jobs lost would be in the US. The report cited Dennis Woodside, Motorola's then new chief executive, as saying that the company planned to leave unprofitable markets, stop making low-end devices, and focus on a few cellphones instead of dozens. “Woodside also plans to cut the number of devices Motorola makes from the 27 it introduced last year to just a few. He wants to make the company's products cool again by loading them with things like sensors that recognise who is in a room based on their voices, cameras that take crisper photos and batteries that last for days,” the report stated.

Woodside had said Google benefited from many manufacturers’ using Android and repeated Google’s promise that Motorola would have no advantages. He said Motorola would also compete equally with others to build Google-branded Nexus devices, which Google makes with a hardware partner when it introduces new versions of Android.

It is believed that Motorola would continue to sell its products in India till stocks are depleted, and the company's service centres would remain operational for those who are using existing handsets.