Reuters
EE Times Europe
(04/24/2008 7:24 EDT)

NEW YORK - Motorola Inc said on Thursday its quarterly loss widened on cell phone sales that were at the low end of expectations, signaling further market share losses to Nokia and other rivals.

Motorola, which has struggled to come up with a successful phone since launching its Razr in late 2004, posted a loss of $194 million, or 9 cents per share compared with a loss of $181 million, or 8 cents a share in the year-ago quarter.

Net sales fell to $7.45 billion from $9.43 billion.

The Schaumburg, Illinois-based company sold 27.4 million phones in the quarter compared with 45.4 million in the year ago quarter. Five analysts polled by Reuters had phone sale estimates ranging from 25 million to 31.7 million.

Motorola forecast a second quarter loss from continuing operations of 2 cents to 4 cents per share, excluding any reorganization of business charges related to efforts to reduce expenses.

Its mobile devices business first-quarter operating loss widened to $418 million from $233 million in the year-ago quarter on revenue of $3.3 billion, which was down 39 percent from a year earlier.

Motorola, which plans to spin off its mobile devices unit, has lost about 60 percent of its market value since its results first started to disappoint investors around mid-October 2006. (Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Derek Caney)