TORONTO: Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc, spun off in January from parent Motorola Inc, reported a narrower loss than analysts projected as it sold more Droid and Atrix phones.
The loss excluding some charges was 8 cents a share, the Libertyville, Illinois-based company said in a statement today, compared with an average estimate for a loss of 12 cents in a Bloomberg survey of analysts. Sales climbed 22 percent to $3.03 billion. Analysts forecast $2.84 billion.
Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Jha has capitalized on the rising popularity of Google Inc's Android operating system that underpins its phones to return Motorola to bring Motorola closer to profitability. At the same time, he has to develop phones that stand out from other Android handsets made by competitors Samsung Electronics Co and HTC Corp.
"It was a solid quarter," said Michael Walkley, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity Ltd., who rates RIM a "hold." "Jha made great headway last year. The question now is can he continue to do so this year as Android becomes more competitive with HTC becoming stronger."
While Motorola's Droid X and Atrix are the third and fifth most popular smartphones at Web retailer Amazon.com Inc, HTC phones including the Thunderbolt rank first, second and fourth on that list.
Android powered half of all smartphones bought in the US in the past six months, double that for Apple Inc's iPhone, according to a March survey by Nielsen Inc. Rising sales will help Android to account for half of the total market in 2012 as Motorola, Samsung and others push into emerging markets with customers looking for cheaper alternatives to the iPhone, Gartner Inc said this month.
Smartphone sales
Motorola Mobility said it sold 4.1 million smartphones last quarter, compared with an average analyst estimate of about 3.8 million phones.
Revenue and smartphone shipments will both climb sequentially in the second quarter from the first, Jha said in a telephone interview. Motorola sold more than 250,000 of its Xoom tablets last quarter, a figure Jha said he was "pleased" with given the device only went on sale in February. Sales in the second-quarter should "meaningfully" improve from the first three months of the year, he said.
While he declined to give a second-quarter outlook for the profitability of the handset business, the unit will be profitable over the full year, he said.
The company said in its statement that it will be break even in the second quarter or earn a profit of 12 cents, excluding some items. Analysts forecast a profit of 11 cents a share. The company lost $81 million, or 27 cents a share, compared with a loss of $212 million a year earlier.
Motorola Mobility rose as much as 3 percent to $24.70 in late trading, after climbing 37 cents to $23.99 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The stock has dropped 18 percent this year.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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