Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions began trading separately on Tuesday, the final step in Motorola’s two-and-half-year process in becoming two independent companies.
Motorola’s longtime ticker symbol, MOT, was retired on Tuesday as Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc. began trading under its new name, Motorola Solutions, with the ticker MSI. Motorola Mobility, which was spun off as a new company, trades under the ticker MMI.
Shares of Motorola Mobility, which includes the smartphone and TV set-top business, closed 9.5 percent higher at $33.12. Shares of Motorola Solutions Inc , which targets businesses with products like barcode scanners, closed up $2.46, or 7.6 percent, at $39.77.
Motorola Mobility had already been trading in the “when issued” market on the New York Stock Exchange since Dec. 17. The when issued market facilitates the conditional trade of a security that has been authorized but not yet issued, and players in this market tend to be institutional investors. The when issued market for Motorola Mobility ended with the close of the Monday session.
To mark the occasion on Tuesday, Motorola Mobility Chief Executive Sanjay Jha rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Motorola Solutions CEO Greg Brown is scheduled to ring the closing bell.
Executives undertook the separation to give Motorola’s disparate business units greater focus on their core strengths and customer bases. Motorola Mobility, which makes mobile devices and TV set-top boxes, is more consumer- and product-centric than Solutions, which focuses on communications gear such as police radios and barcode scanners for government and industrial clients. The separation also frees the Solutions units from needing to fund the mobile devices division, a burden that those better-performing businesses carried for years.
In the spin off, investors that owned Motorola Inc. stock as of Dec. 21, 2010 received one share of Motorola Mobility common stock for every eight shares of their Motorola common stock. Motorola also conducted a one-for-seven reverse stock split of Motorola common stock, hoping to boost its share price to attract more institutional investors and brokerage firms.
With Reuters
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