Recovering handset maker Motorola Mobility reported another quarterly loss, with several flies in the ointment which caused some concerns looking forward. For the second quarter of 2011, it reported a net loss of US$56 million, compared with a prior year profit of US$80 million, on revenue of US$3.34 billion, up 27.9 percent. For its Mobile Devices business (the company also has a Home line), it reported an operating loss of US$85 million, down from a profit of US$87 million, on sales of US$2.43 billion, up 41 percent. Sanjay Jha, the company’s CEO (pictured), acknowledged delays to the company’s first LTE smartphone, Bionic, were “disappointing,” while stating that this failure to deliver is an “exception rather than the rule.” The device is now set for release in September 2011, which means it will have a limited window to deliver in Motorola’s third quarter. Marc Rothman, the company’s CFO, said that the company anticipates shipment growth for smartphones and feature phones in the next period, but “we expect Xoom shipments to be sequentially lower as we transition the portfolio.”  By the end of 2011, Motorola expects to have “at least five” LTE devices in the market, including one more smartphone and two additional tablets.

The growth in sales for Mobile Devices during the second quarter was “driven largely by Latin America and China, where sales more than doubled year-on-year.”  During the period, the company shipped 11 million mobile devices, including 4.4 million smartphone and 440,000 tablets. This compares with 8.3 million devices, including 2.7 million smartphones, in the second quarter of 2010. Despite the company’s focus on smartphones, its feature phone volumes increased by 1.3 million to 6.2 million sequentially, driven by “continued strong demand for our devices in Latin America.” In the second half of the year, the company plans to launch at least one more LTE device, a refreshed version of its Defy smartphone, and “several” sub-US$200 handsets for emerging markets. Also in the pipeline is the LTE upgrade for the Xoom tablet, and “two additional LTE tablet introductions later this year.”