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Wednesday, August 06
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Embattled American telecom major Motorola, en route to functioning as two entities in a last-ditch effort to return to pink health, has appointed an Indian engineering whizkid Sanjay Jha as the CEO of its newly-carved mobile handsets entity.
Jha, who was working at Qualcomm as its chief operating officer and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT) group, has already quit the telecom major. He will soon take charge at Motorola as co-CEO, and first CEO of Motorola Mobile Devices.
He was the first Indian executive to have risen to the top echelons of the San Diego headquartered company that is best known as the propagator of the CDMA (core division multiple access) cellular mobile technology.
Forty five-year-old Jha had started as a senior engineer at Qualcomm VLSI (very large scale integration) group in 1994 and was promoted as senior vice-president of engineering in 1998.
He was elevated as the president of QCT in 2003 when the chipset and software division was started at Qualcomm. For the past five years, this division of Qualcomm has been ranked among the world's largest fabless semiconductor producers, and was rated as being ahead of the leader Texas Instruments last year. Qualcomm had sold its own CDMA cell phone business to Kyocera in February 2000.
"Jha's leadership has been instrumental in growing QCT into the number one wireless semiconductor supplier," commented Qualcomm CEO Paul E Jacobs.
In recognition, Jha was named the COO of the company in December 2006.
At Motorola, Jha will have his task cut out in a role for which Motorola had been feverishly hunting for a head, a position that was refused by the famed turnaround executive Todd Bradly of HP as recently as in June.
Motorola reported a surprise small profit at the end of its latest quarterly results on July 31 which was attributed to better sales from its enterprise mobility solutions division.
But the American cell phone pioneer has slipped to the fourth position in global handset sales and the downslide has been quite sharp. Therefore, reversing the fortunes of the company’s loss-making handset business – comprising over one third of Motorola’s total business worth $36.6 billion - will be quite a challenge for the Indian as he moves from an enterprise sales environment to a company that has to endear itself to retail consumers.
That may well be a daunting task given the competition and how Apple has completely rewritten the rules for all other mobile handset makers with its iconic iPhone. Almost every cell phone vendor is racing to launch its own touch screen phones to rival iPhone’s popularity.
If he succeeds, understated Jha’s stock may well skyrocket. He has a unique opportunity to be billed the turnaround CEO Motorola was so desperately looking for ever since the former head of its handset division Ron Garriques joined Dell in January 2007, followed by CEO Ed Zander later.
"I welcome the opportunity to lead Motorola into the future, while working to create a successful independent Mobile Devices company that will continue to innovate and grow for years to come,” is all that Jha would say.
Incidentally, Motorola works in close tandem with Qualcomm and has a good hold on the CDMA market. It is also one of the biggest buyers of Qualcomm’s semiconductor chips which are used in its devices, from handsets to two-way radios and set top boxes.
A Qualcomm spokesperson told Indiatimes News Network that the company was looking forward to working with Jha in his new role at Motorola as the latter has been an important customer for Qualcomm for many years.
"I look forward to close cooperation with Qualcomm in the future and appreciate the opportunities I have had over my 14-year career at the company," added Jha.
Motorola’s existing CEO Greg Brown will also serve as co-CEO and has been named the CEO of Motorola's Broadband Mobility Solutions business which consists of the home and networks mobility and enterprise mobility solutions businesses.
“Brown and Jha will share responsibility for Motorola as it moves towards separating into two independent, publicly-traded companies,” the company announced..
"Sanjay's technical expertise and industry experience make him ideally suited to lead Mobile Devices. As Co-CEOs, Greg and Sanjay will build on the significant changes and solid progress achieved at Motorola and the Mobile Devices business under Greg's leadership during the last seven months. I believe this is the right structure with the right leaders to provide the necessary management focus and agility to position both businesses for long-term success," said Motorola chairman David Dorman in a statement.
Meanwhile, pursuant to Jha’s departure, Qualcomm has announced the appointment of Len Lauer, executive vice-president and group president, as Jha's replacement by promoting him to the post of chief operating officer. It also promoted Steve Mollenkopf, executive VP of QCT, as the president of QCT. The company had already promoted Jim Lederer as executive VP of business planning and finance for QCT recently.
Qualcomm also announced the election of Stephen M Bennett to its board of directors. Bennett is a 30-year veteran of financial and business expertise, and has served as CEO of Intuit Inc, besides having held several key executive positions at General Electric Company.
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