Zebra Acquires Moto Enterprise: Who's The Winner?

In a big but unsurprising move, Motorola Solutions is offloading its enterprise business to Zebra Technologies in a $3.45 billion deal expected to close by the end of the year.

Motorola CEO Greg Brown says the decision to sell was based on the company’s desire to focus on its government and public safety sectors, where Motorola enjoys a 10,000-strong worldwide install base. That makes good sense given the long-term projection for continued implementation of proprietary, rugged, highly secure mobile communications networks and devices in those markets. That’s Motorola’s wheelhouse, Brown says those sales pipelines are strong, and certainly no one anticipates a move to consumer-grade smartphones as the device du-jour in government and public safety applications.

But an aversion to consumer-grade devices couldn’t be further from the case in retail, which begs a host of questions about what comes next for Zebra. In effect, Zebra will pick up Motorola’s enterprise mobile computing, printing, and asset capture business, which just posted a 9 percent Q1 year-over-year sales decline for Motorola. On an April 15 conference call, Brown said a lack of synergy between its government/public safety and enterprise business technologies motivated the sale, suggesting the combination of Motorola Enterprise and Zebra would better position Zebra’s newly combined resources to keep pace with fast enterprise mobile device development cycles.

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