Motorola may have posted an unexpected profit in the first quarter of this year, but Apple has dethroned them as the largest U.S. maker of cell phones.
Forbes is reporting on the latest cell phone industry news out of the U.S., which shows that iPhone maker Apple Inc. is now poised as the largest domestic maker of cell phones, having sold 8.8 million devices in the first quarter of this year. Schaumburg, Illinois-based Motorola dropped to the number two spot with 8.5 million -- which doesn’t sound so bad, until you realize the company currently offers 117 different models of cell phones versus Apple’s two iPhone models, according to Motorola’s own U.S. website.
It wasn’t all that long ago -- four years to be exact -- that Motorola was the undisputed king of the U.S. cell phone industry, having sold 46.1 million handsets in the first quarter of that year, largely led by the wildly popular Razr.
The news isn’t all bad for Motorola this year, however: Wall Street wasn’t really expecting the company to post a profit in the first quarter, but they did indeed, with profit of $69 million on total revenue of $5.04 billion. In the same quarter a year ago, Motorola lost $231 million, so in that light, it’s a major improvement indeed.
Motorola’s comeback strategy has largely been focused on smartphones such as the Android-powered Droid and overall, Motorola sold 2.3 million such devices in the first three months of this year, compared with their own expectations of less than two million.
