Motorola Hires New Cellphone CEO: Qualcomm's Sanjay Jha (MOT)

Motorola (MOT) finally has its turnaround man: The company named Dr. Sanjay Jha co-CEO and CEO of its Mobile Devices business this morning. Jha will lead the company's cellphone spinoff, scheduled for Q3 2008, and will be tasked with making the once-great cellphone company profitable again.

Note: Live blogging the conference call, right now.

Greg Brown, who's been Motorola's CEO since Ed Zander left last year, is now co-CEO of the company, and will continue to lead Motorola's infrastructure businesses, which include wireless network gear and cable set-top boxes.

Jha, 45, was a rising star at Qualcomm -- most recently as COO, which he was promoted to in December, 2006. He has an engineering background and recently led development of Qualcomm's Flarion group -- a WiMax competitor -- as well as CDMA, Qualcomm's chipset and software division.

His task at Motorola: Right a sinking ship that's lost money, market share, and relevance, and figure out a multi-pronged approach to compete with cheap phones in emerging markets, high-end smartphone platforms from the likes of Apple (AAPL) and Research In Motion (RIMM), and services that rivals like Nokia (NOK) are increasingly investing in.

See Also:
Motorola Q2 Sales Beat Street, Breaks Even, Spinoff On Track For Q3 2009
Motorola Reorgs Gear Business, Prepping For Sales?