Ed Zander's exit was hastened by a failure to anticipate demand for 3G phones. Can Greg Brown help Motorola regain market share?You could sense it coming. The departure of Motorola (MOT) Chief Executive Ed Zander seemed imminent as the company's bread-and-butter mobile-phone unit spiraled downward for more than a year. The market-share losses have become so pronounced that researcher Gartner (IT) recently said Motorola, long the second-largest maker of cell phones, behind Nokia (NOK), had fallen to No. 3, behind Samsung, whose 14.5% share now trumps Motorola's 13.1%.
So there was little surprise when Motorola announced on Nov. 30 that Zander, 60, will step down as chief executive on Jan. 1. Into the hot seat steps current President and Chief Operating Officer Greg Brown, 47, a possibility BusinessWeek noted in July (BusinessWeek, 7/30/07).
Zander will remain chairman until the company's annual shareholder meeting in May, 2008, and then serve as a nonexecutive adviser to Brown until January, 2009. "I had a vision in my mind that four years would be it," Zander said in an interview. "I told that to the board when I joined. A couple of years into this, we started to do succession planning and identified Greg as the guy that could lead this company."
Read More
