Last December when Padmashree Warrior left Motorola to join Cisco as its chief technology officer, the fate of the over $37 billion (2007 figure) global communications player was hotly debated. Especially since Warrior was credited to a very large extent with the success of Motorola’s largest-selling and most popular handset series -- the Razr.
Shareholders of Motorola should heave a sigh of relief now that the company has managed to lure Qualcomm's Sanjay Jha to be its new co-chief executive and chief of Mobile Devices -- the unit that makes handsets.
Indian-born Jha's hiring had boosted the Schaumburg-based Motorola's market capitalisation by over $2 billion in a single day of trading – a sign that he surely has the credentials. He holds a Ph.D in electronic and electrical engineering from the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, and a Bachelor's in engineering from the University of Liverpool, England.
Jha was an engineer at Brooktree in San Diego, and GEC Hirst Research Labs in London before joining Qualcomm in 1994 as a senior engineer to work on a satellite phone. He became vice-president of engineering in 1997, overseeing development of cellphone chips and software, and began Qualcomm's investment arm in 2002 and its president in 2003. He also became executive vice-president of the whole company before being named Qualcomm's chief operating officer in 2006.
Image: Sanjay Jha, co-CEO, Motorola.
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