Sanjay Jha to head Motorola's new mobile phone entity

05th January 2011
Sanjay Jha to head Motorola's new mobile phone entity

Motorola the company that pioneered the mobile phone back in the early 1970s has split into two companies: while Motorola Mobility headed by India born Sanjay Jha will handle the company's consumer-oriented products, like cell phones, smartphones, tablets, set-tops and other converged devices while Motorola Solutions look after the police radios and barcode scanners to government and business customers.
“We are pleased that Motorola Mobility has reached this important milestone. After more than two years of planning, today we begin operating as a financially strong, independent company trading on the New York Stock Exchange,” said Sanjay Jha, chairman and CEO of Motorola Mobility.

“With more than 20,000 employees globally, 24,500 patents granted and pending, and a highly recognizable brand, we are able to deliver cutting-edge devices with differentiated software experiences. In addition, we will continue to work aggressively to capitalize on the next generation of converged devices and experiences to provide consumers with more intuitive and personalized services,” Jha added.

Writes Bloomberg Businessweek: “Motorola Mobility Inc., the mobile- phone maker spun off fromMotorola Inc. today, won’t just need to challenge Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd. to succeed. It also needs to defy history.
No mobile-phone maker has returned to the top after losing its foothold, underscoring how competitive the industry is and how quickly customer tastes change. Motorola’s handset business, No. 2 globally as recently as 2007, has fallen to seventh, according to researcher Gartner Inc., and is now separating from the rest of the company in a bid to recover.
Jha is banking on continued demand for phones built on Google Inc.’s Android software to win users from Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry. He also needs to persuade consumers to choose Motorola’s handsets over Android phones made by HTC Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co.”

From Wikipedia: Sanjay Jha(born 1963) is Chairman and CEO of Motorola Mobility and previous served as co-chief executive officer of Motorola, Inc. from 2008. He was born in Madhubani Bihar. He holds a Ph.D. in electronic and electrical engineering from theUniversity of Strathclyde, Scotland. He received his bachelor of science degree in engineering from the University of Liverpool, England. ha began his career at Qualcomm in 1994 as a senior engineer with the Qualcomm VLSI (very large-scale integration) group working on the Globalstar satellite phone, and later on the first 13k vocoder ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit), which was integrated into Qualcomm's MSM2200 chipset. In 1997, Jha was promoted to vice president of engineering, where he was responsible for leading the integrated-circuit engineering group. Jha led and oversaw the development of five generations of modem and cell site chipsets, both digital baseband and RF (radio frequency), and system software. He was promoted to senior vice president of engineering in 1998.
In 2002, Jha led the formation of Qualcomm Technologies & Ventures, where he managed both the technology investment portfolio and the new technology group as senior vice president and general manager. Jha became executive vice president of Qualcomm and president of QCT in 2003. He was named COO in December 2006.

Link to CNN video interview with Sanjay Jha: http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2011/01/04/t_co_quest_motorola_ceo.cnnmoney/  
Jan 5 2011