Posts Tagged ‘Sanjay Jha’

Sanjay Jha, Motorola co-CEO and former Qualcomm exec who is in charge of resurrecting Motorola’s mobile devices division, is about to slash jobs in an attempt to rein in costs, Engadget reports.

According to the article, Jha said to employees that Motorola seems to have anywhere from two to three times as many employees working on individual projects as the other major manufacturers (which we presume to mean LG, Samsung, and others.)

The cuts are reported to be in the works for as early as Thursday (tomorrow), numbering in the thousands.

As we reported late yesterday, Motorola has hired Sanjay Jha from Qualcomm in order to head up the company’s handset business and act as co-CEO. As Fortune writes, the move comes just months after Motorola said it would separate the handset business from the rest of the companies, in an olive branch to dissident shareholder Carl Icahn.

“Critics of the splitup plan say little will be accomplished by breaking Motorola’s money-losing handset business off from its profitable networking and enterprise mobility operations,” the report said. Fortune has previously claimed that the move will mean higher costs and less access to resources in the future.

With the new executive in place to run the division, Motorola has officially dug in its heels, even as they continue to lose market share at an alarming rate.

Motorola lured away Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha to become co-CEO and head of its ailing handset business in preparation for a planned spin-off.

Jha is taking control of the mobile devices unit from Moto chief Greg Brown, who has been handling since former device head Stu Reed left in March. Brown and Jha will now share the CEO position until the mobile business spins off, an event that’s supposed to happen in the third-quarter of 2009.

Jha definitely has his work cut out for him. Its share of the mobile phone market has been halved over the past two years thanks to more advanced handsets from Nokia and a little phenom called the iPhone.

According to a Bloomberg report, Motorola said it will release 34 devices by year-end, which makes us wonder is maybe it got “quality” and “quantity” mixed up.

Regarding Jha’s appointment, Morgan Keegan & Co. analyst Tavis McCourt told Bloomberg that it might be a couple of years before we see how Jha affects the actual product, while his effect on the business itself will be apparent sooner. “Probably his biggest impact will be the level and type of engineering talent he will attract to the company over time,” said McCourt.

(Image credit: Seokyong Lee/Bloomberg News)