Motorola (MOT): A Quick Break-Up For A Profit

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Motorola (MOT) hit a 52-week low today. Make that a multiple year low, at $7.36. Piper Jaffray downgraded the stock last week. The question about the company is whether it is worth more than the sum of its parts.

The handset division is about to be spun-out. Those shares are probably an immediate “sell”. The unit has gone from a global market share of 22% to about 12% and it has not new products to improve that trend. RIM (RIMM), Apple (AAPL), Palm (PALM), and Nokia (NOK) have all launched new handsets. That will squeeze MOT even further. But, holding shares in the company which is left, which has the firm’s home mobility and enterprise units may be rewarding.

Last quarter those parts of the company brought in $4.2 billion and that is growing. They had over $400 million in operating profits. Without handsets, MOT could be a growth stock.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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