Motorola Mobility lowers expectations as it slides to $56M loss

Almost everything is up at Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. (MMI) except for profits. The company swung to a $56 million loss in the last quarter, after recording $80 million in profits a year ago. Motorola shipped 11.1 million devices total, including 4.4 million smartphones and 440,000 Xoom tablets.
Device shipments are up 25% and smartphone shipments are up 39%. Mobile device revenues grew more than 40% year over year and overall revenues are up 28% from the year-ago period to $3.3 billion.
During an earnings call, the company would only say that it expects the mobile device business to be “modestly profitable” for the full year with generally flat guidance overall.
The company is still committed to releasing the Droid Bionic and an LTE upgrade for the Xoom in September. Before the end of the year, Motorola plans to have five LTE devices on the market. The Xoom will eventually be phased out as the company introduces two LTE tablets and at least one new smartphone will be released with LTE before the end of the year.
Tablets are still a relatively small business for Motorola. The company doesn’t expect to ship more than 1.5 million for the full year, which means the company doesn’t expect the remainder of 2011 to be any stronger than the first half of the year. Competition from larger Android OEMs is a long-term concern.
“We will have at least five devices in the marketplace with LTE and of those, we anticipate, other than Bionic and Xoom LTE, we will launch another three devices in the fourth quarter,” CEO Sanjay Jha said during an earnings call. Jha added that he expects LTE to be a strong focus for carriers in the fourth quarter, though he declined to provide guidance on how much of Motorola’s total volume will be LTE devices.