The Buck Keeps On Leaving Zander

There’s a bit of a death-watch going on for Ed Zander’s CEO position at Motorola…an expected outcome of Motorola saying it has lost money and marketshare again in the second quarter of this year, despite the overall mobile handset market picking up. Activist investors aside, just how does the market view Zander’s performance? “Motorola shares rose almost 3% in the hours before the company’s dour sales announcement amid speculation that Zander could be about to resign” notes BusinessWeek, which is as clear a sign as anything that investors think a CEO is doing a bad job. With headlines like ZNDR in TRBL and Start the Zander Countdown it’s pretty clear that the press think Zander is now destined to exit the top job. Of course, even if Zander does go it would take a new CEO several quarters to have any effect on the handsets put out by Motorola because that’s how long it takes to produce handsets (although he would likely start with a share price boost simply as a vote of change) so nobody should be expecting radical changes in the line-up anytime soon.

Mind you, it shouldn’t be that unexpected that Motorola’s fortunes continue to wane: Even if you do think that new handsets produced under Zander’s tenure will turn the business around they won’t have a significant impact on sales until the third quarter. The real problem is that Motorola indicated the first quarter was the trough, and miscalculated how many handsets it would sell in the second quarter. Not knowing your business is bad enough, but one way that Motorola got into trouble in the first place was by over-calculating how many handsets it had sold and suddenly finding itself with a lot of unsold inventory in the distribution chain — it can’t afford to have that happen again.

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