Motorola president tips 3G growth
Published: 28 Oct 2003 15:45 GMT
The market for high-speed cellular data handsets is beginning to take off, according to Motorola's president and chief operating officer.
Mike Zafirovski said that this quarter, the US-based firm will ship between 500,000 and one million of its handsets based on UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service) technology, which is a version of the wideband CDMA (WCDMA) standard used mostly in Europe and Asia.
"We are probably going to sell two times as many. There is real demand from operators like Hutchison," he said.
Motorola supplies 3G handsets to Hutchison in Australia, Austria, Italy, Sweden and the UK.
He acknowledged that the UMTS third-generation (3G) market "had not developed as fast as initially anticipated." But he says that outside Japan, the market will grow to between six million and 10 million units next year, and may eventually become twice that.
He believed his firm was poised to reap benefits from the growth in the 3G handset market because it had made various technology investments early in the game, he said.
Motorola aims to win a 25 percent global handset market share in two to three years, compared to its current 18 to 19 percent. He said that the firm is now leading in China, the US and in developing markets with large growth potential like Brazil, Argentina, Russia and Nigeria. Finnish giant Nokia is the global leader in handset market share.
"We are quite optimistic we are doing the right things to help grow this business," he said.
Zafirovski disputed recent figures showing that Motorola had slipped to the No. 2 spot in handset market share in China, saying that the results could have been derived from lumping several domestic makers together as one competitor.
"We are still number one and we will remain number one," he said. He cited China market-share figures of 22 to 23 percent, though others have estimated it at around 14 percent in the second quarter of this year.
Still, the firm was increasing its sales, marketing and localisation engineering efforts in the country, which analysts say is set to become the largest handset market in the world.
He gave few details on the topic of the next Motorola chief executive, saying it was a matter for the board of directors to decide, but acknowledged that he had been named as a candidate for the job.
He also said that he was conducting a search for the next president of Motorola China, following the departure of Timothy Chen, who left take over as head of Microsoft Greater China in August this year. Zafirovski said he hoped to have the position filled by the end of the year.
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