Motorola will continue with its aggressive efforts to cut costs
this year, focusing its strategy on five key markets and closing
more of its semiconductor fabrication plants, president and chief
operating officer Ed Breen told financial analysts.
Aiming to return the company to profitability while still investing
in new technologies, Motorola will continue to cut its work force,
streamline management and outsource manufacturing operations, Breen
said.
"We're gonna take the bricks and mortar out," Breen said. After
cutting its roster of chip-fabrication plants, last year from 18 to
14, Motorola plans to cut that number to eight, he said.
Breen, the former head of General Instrument, who joined Motorola
after it bought General Instrument in 2000, slammed Motorola's
management history and promised that changes would be
uncompromising.
"The company's overhead and [minimum revenue for] break-even was
just out of whack," Breen said. "Motorola never made good money
even when it made good money."
Non-core businesses will be eliminated and management will be
pared, including the number of vice-presidents, reducing the number
by 20% to 25%, over the next 60 days..
"Nothing is going to be sacred around the company," he said.
Motorola's five core businesses now are mobile handsets,
service-provider infrastructure, semiconductors, broadband
equipment and commercial and public-safety networks.
In the handset business, Motorola expects to thrive in a shakeout
that will occur as vendors attempt to develop and sell devices for
3G networks, Breen said. That migration will be harder than the
move from traditional voice phones to 2.5G products such as GPRS
handsets, which began to hit the market last year, he said.
Whereas the handset business had turned the corner by the end of
last year, sales of service-provider infrastructure equipment will
continue to be weak in 2002, with revenue down about 10% as
carriers keep capital expenditure low, he said. Asia will be the
key growth market as European and North American networks already
are more fully built out.
In semiconductors, Motorola is moving toward an "asset-light"
strategy to keep costs down and boost margins, which have been at
half the industry average, Breen said. The company is looking for
deals to outsource the manufacturing of its chips.
Motorola's public safety systems, which now are being built to link
the networks of police, fire and other authorities across entire
states, are likely to be an area of growing investment in the wake
of last September's terrorist attacks.
"With the events going on in the world right now... I don't think
there's a better-positioned company to participate in homeland
security in the US than Motorola," Breen said.