(Bloomberg) -- Motorola, a brand name once synonymous with mobile phones and bulky headsets used by pro football coaches, made headlines last month when the company was accused on social media of making the pagers that exploded in Lebanon.
Motorola Solutions Inc., the company that bears the name today, doesn’t actually make pagers anymore. In reality, the 96-year-old business is thriving after reinventing itself as a provider of high-tech security products for businesses and governments. The Chicago-based company provides two-way radios for firefighters, body cameras for police officers and software that sends email and text alerts during emergencies.
Sales climbed 10% to nearly $10 billion in 2023, and the company projects an 8% increase this year. The stock recently hit an all-time high of $450 a share.
“These guys are the early phases of the Minority Report,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho, referencing the 2002 Tom Cruise film where police use psychic technologies to catch criminals before they commit crimes. “They’re the Apple, Google and Oracle of public safety.”
The original Motorola was founded in 1928 and developed quickly into a maker of car radios. In the 1970s and 1980s, it helped pioneer the cell phone business with its clunky shoe-sized devices. But despite its early lead, the company couldn’t keep up with technological advances and low-cost overseas manufacturing, losing ground to Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and others.
In 2011, the company split into two businesses, Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility. The latter was sold first to Google and then to China’s Lenovo Group Ltd., which still sells phones under the brand today.
Motorola Solutions went on an acquisition spree of its own. The company has spent roughly $6 billion since 2015 buying more than 25 firms. Those include Avigilon, which uses artificial intelligence to monitor and catalog streams from surveillance cameras, and VaaS International Holdings Inc., which makes license plate detection and scanning systems for law enforcement.
Motorola’s portfolio has the potential to touch every moment in an emergency, according to Bloomberg’s Ho. In the event of a school shooting, for example, the company’s products could receive the 911 call at the dispatch center, tap into surveillance camera feeds inside the school to locate the aggressor, and help local police communicate to intervene.
How exactly the Motorola name got dragged into exploding devices that killed or wounded thousands in Lebanon isn’t clear. Gold Apollo Co., a Taiwanese company whose brand appeared on some of the pagers, has said it licensed its trademark to BAC, a Hungarian company.
Motorola declined to comment for this story. In an August interview with Barron’s, Chief Executive Officer Greg Brown acknowledged that the company is still associated with the handsets it used to make. Motorola supplies software to almost two-thirds of the 911 call centers in North America, Brown said, and operates 13,000 private networks allowing first responders to communicate without the congestion that sometimes shuts down cellular service during emergencies.
“We connect people in need with those who can help,” he said
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