Motorola slips to 3rd in mobile phone market "Motorola has dropped to third place behind Samsung in the worldwide mobile phone market because of inventory issues and an unremarkable product lineup, Gartner said on Tuesday.

Motorola accounted for 13 percent of the phones sold to end users in the third quarter, down from 21 percent in the same quarter last year, Gartner said. At the same time, Samsung increased its share to 15 percent, while Nokia extended its lead at the top of the pack, accounting for 38 percent of the market, or more than one in every three mobile phones sold.

The figures will be a blow to Motorola, which lost share amid a strengthening market overall. Total sales to end users last quarter reached 289 million phones, up 15 percent from a year earlier. But Motorola had performed poorly all year, so the results were no great surprise, according to Carolina Milanesi, Gartner's research director for mobile devices.

"Motorola's been struggling since the end of 2006, so it's not just this quarter," she said.

Its problems have been two-fold, according to Milanesi. Motorola hasn't developed a phone to ignite the imagination in the way its popular Razr did a few years ago, she said, leaving it with a weak line-up. "The Razr2 has done okay, but it's not had the same impact that the first Razr did," she said."

Labels: cell phones, motorola

  ¶ posted by Jimmie Geddes, Editor @ 11/28/2007 04:39:00 PM