An embattled Ed Zander, Motorola's CEO, has just launched a new family of
second generation Razr phones in an effort to shore up the company's rapidly
declines fortunes and market share.
As if to rub salt in Motorola's wounds, Nokia said recently that it expected its
market share in Q2 2007 to go above the current level of about 36 per cent.
Analysts immediately assumed that Nokia was making reference to Motorola's
weakness by making such a comment.
But are they all barking up the wrong tree? The new Razr 2 phones are aimed at
the high margin end of developed markets. But if you look at which handsets are
attempting to steal this ground, it looks like LG may have an advantage.
According to independent analyst, Jayker Shah, the handsets playing in this
niche will be the Nokia N95; RIM's Blackberry Pearl and 8700; Samsung's X830 and
P310; Sony Ericsson's W880i and the Apple iPhone. Against this LG has the Prada,
the Shine and the Chocolate. "From this I anticipate that LG is going to be a
big market share winner in the next six months though its brand may have less
affinity. The LG brand is still below the other competitors on the 'cool' scale
so co-branding with Prada was a very smart move," Shah told Mobile Insight. There are actually
going to be three models in the Razr 2 range. The V9 (3G HSDPA), V9m (EVDO CDMA)
and V8 (GSM). The first of these should appear by Jul 2007. One of the benefits
is that the V8 has a completely redesigned user interface. More importantly
Motorola claims with the new ARM 11 processor, processing speed is going to be
10 times faster than the original Razr. Plus with high-speed USB 2.0 it will
only takes two to three seconds to transfer a song. Another good reason why LG
might benefit from Motorola's woes is, of course, that it is a major vendor of
cdmaOne handsets – a sector where Nokia has decided it doesn't really need to
play.
