Talking with Greg Brown, Motorola’s new CEO, is a bit like stepping into The Twilight Zone: Both require you to suspend disbelief, at least temporarily, and simply go with the story line.

Brown says the company’s board is spinning off Motorola’s troubled cell phone division for one reason and one reason only: to “unlock” the value of the business, which has no strategic value to the rest of the company.

Carl Icahn, the corporate-raider-turned-shareholder-activist, has pushed Motorola for more than a year to take such a step. Brown says, “That really wasn’t a factor.”

Even whether the handset division were flying high and Icahn hadn’t shown up, he says, “The outcome would have been the same. We would have spun it off anyways.”

So it goes these days at Motorola, which is struggling to recover from a string of management, marketing and product blunders. The missteps have left it ill-prepared to compete in the wireless industry it

birthed and promoted for more than 35 years.

Motorola’s reply, for now, is to split itself into two parts: one devoted to the money-losing handset business, the other to the profitable parts of the company that supply software, hardware and broadband gear to a range of government and corporate customers. About half of Motorola’s $37 billion in annual revenue is generated by the cell phone business. The balance is from the other two divisions.

The split, which will aftereffect in two independent companies with separately traded stocks, is expected to take about a year to complete. Investors will wind up with shares in both. Brown plans to join the successful part of the business. A search for a CEO for the handset business is underway.

Some analysts are lukewarm, at best, to Motorola’s plan. “Breakups don’t usually enhance shareholder value,” says Mark Sue, an analyst at RBC Capital in New…

Orginal post by Top Tech News