Effective January 4, 2011, Motorola, Inc. will become two separate companies: Motorola Solutions, Inc. and Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. Following the split, the company's current co-CEOs, Greg Brown and Sanjay Jha, will head up Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility, respectively.
This company restructuring comes along with a stock restructuring. Current shareholders will get one share of Motorola Solutions stock per seven Motorola, Inc. shares and one share of Mobility stock per eight shares. Motorola Solutions will be home to the infrastructure businesses while Motorola Mobility will be the one focused on mobile phones and consumer devices.
A split like this has been in the works since at least 2008.
We're going to make a wildly speculative guess and suggest that the blockbuster success of the Motorola Droid has had something to do with the company's growth in the mobile sector.
Various models of the Droid have been so popular they've been hard to find in stores. Over the summer, the company's Android-powered devices were selling faster than they could be built.
In fact, the Android platform has been a huge boost to Motorola's success ever since the original Droid launched almost one year ago, when the company moved a healthy quarter of a million units during the first week of sales.