DENVER, United States—A potentially important deal between Motorola and Multitone Electronics has fallen through, Motorola confirmed, which leaves the paging and messaging landscape still more uncertain.
Last year, Motorola announced it would exit the paging and messaging industry altogether, and would stop making its one- and two-way paging devices. Motorola is the only company that builds two-way paging devices for U.S. paging carriers.
In February, Motorola said it would transition its device-making business to U.K.-based Multitone. Under the deal, Multitone would take over the production of Motorola’s Advisor Elite and Advisor Gold one-way pagers and the Talkabout T900 and Timeport P935 two-way pagers. Multitone would not use the Motorola name, but would build essentially the same devices and would market them under the Advisor, T900 and P935 brands.
Negotiations between the two companies broke down about two weeks ago.
“Multitone wasn’t able to meet some of the deadlines that were in place,” said Motorola spokeswoman Josephine Posti.
Multitone approached Motorola shortly after the company said it would exit the paging and messaging business and offered to take over Motorola’s role in the industry, Posti said. But Motorola plans to completely shut down its business by the middle of this year—the last of the company’s paging and messaging employees will leave the company in September—and the deadline was too short for Multitone to set up a U.S. operation and take over Motorola’s business.
“We needed to complete the transaction with Multitone within a certain time frame,” Posti said.
Multitone declined to comment on the failed negotiations.
