Motorola Solutions Earnings Call Nuggets: Evolution of Operating Expenses and Net Cash Position Goals

Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Evolution of Operating Expenses

Pierre Ferragu – Sanford C. Bernstein, Ltd.: I was wondering how you see the evolution of your operating expenses in 2013. If I look at the way you have guided the year, in top line and in operating margins, if I assume things are not going to change much at your gross margin level, I thought it would end up with OpEx growing at faster rate than it 2012. So is that just me making the wrong assumptions or do you see like expenses increasing a bit faster this year compared to last year?

Edward J. Fitzpatrick – EVP and CFO: I think on the operating expenses side you shouldn’t see a significant changes year-over-year. The one benefit that I’d mentioned was the pension expense would be a bit better. Other than that, we will dial-up and dial-down as appropriately within R&D, marketing and selling to make that we are addressing the opportunities, but the year-over-year level should be relatively consistent, up slightly driven by annual merits and the like Pierre.

Pierre Ferragu – Sanford C. Bernstein, Ltd.: Maybe if I can just ask one quick follow-up. You have a lot of new products coming in, in your Enterprise division. Could you give us an update on these products, when do you expect them to hit the market? If you have already some perspective on whether your Enterprise clients are going to adapt to these new products relatively quickly? Or if we are in a situation where there is a risk of a very slow ramp up because of the economic environment?

Greg Brown – Chairman and CEO: Yeah, Pierre, I think that we have a couple of the new products already available now on the Enterprise Mobile Computing side. To be more specific ,and some of the new, new, the MC40, we expect to be available and shipping in Q2, which is great a front store facing operations device that will expand our portfolio, our SB1 Smart Badge should also be generally available in Q2 and then the multi-plane scanner should be available by midyear as well. So in addition to some of the new MC series mobile computing devices that are already shipping, we have these new products that will be available in a couple of quarters and we feel pretty good about the portfolio.