Ron Garriques does not lack lofty ambitions.
Garriques, president of Motorola’s mobile devices business, is undertaking a multimillion-dollar “museum quality” restoration of his Lake Forest mansion, built in 1913. The details include a moose head that will grace the restored billiard room where one hung 90 years ago.
On the business side, Garriques unveiled an audacious goal this summer before a crowd of industry analysts: Overtake rival Nokia as the world’s largest mobile phone maker. That would mean boosting Motorola’s market share to 33 percent from 18 percent.
That’s a tall order for the world’s No. 2 mobile phone maker. Still, in the past 18 months, Schaumburg-based Motorola has risen from the doldrums to become arbiter of what’s hip in mobile phones. And Garriques, 41, has led Motorola’s phone operation, the company’s largest and most-well-known division, much of that time.
Some critical decisions underpinning Motorola’s renaissance were made prior to Garriques’ ascension. The Razr, a hot-selling phone that has made Motorola fashionable, has been in the works since 2002.
But Garriques wins analysts’ praise for improving Motorola’s execution. The company hasn’t been plagued with production snafus, like the failure to get camera phones in stores for the 2003 holiday season. And he has pushed to quickly follow up with other stylish phones due in stores soon.
“The Motorola product line looks very strong for the next year,” said Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research in San Francisco.
It is Garriques’ charge to keep it that way. And he has 19 years of experience in the mobile phone business to plumb for ideas.
“It’s the only industry I know,” he said.
His career might have been different had it not for been for an incident during his senior year of high school. Growing up in Hackettstown, N.J., Garriques lived in an apartment with his mother, a divorced beautician. He described himself as “average to good” in a lot of things: school, sports, a job at a pizzeria.
In February 1982, he and a few friends were out celebrating his birthday when they got into an argument with another group of young men. The dispute escalated, and Garriques was stabbed five times. He spent four days in intensive care and lost nearly five pints of blood.
“Before that day, anything was possible. There was nothing that could limit me,” Garriques said. He had been planning to join the Army after high school, possibly pursuing a military career. Recovering from two collapsed lungs, the military no longer seemed realistic.
So he scrambled to get into college as his senior year came to a close. Many schools’ application deadlines had passed, but Boston University let him in. The stabbing brought a new focus, and he became an excellent student.
He considered architecture because old houses intrigued him. As a kid, Garriques would watch “The Munsters” and “The Addams Family” not only because they were funny, but also because the sitcom families’ creepy homes fascinated him.
Becoming an architect, though, would’ve taken at least a fifth year in college. He wanted a decent-paying job sooner in a field with plentiful employment. He chose mechanical engineering, landing work at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
He was a heat-transfer engineer for a few years, figuring out ways to minimize heat in phone equipment, before working his way up to a top management spot. Also while in New Jersey, Garriques began following his passion for old houses, restoring an 1873 Victorian.
He would remake one more home in New Jersey before moving to Illinois in 1999, after Motorola bought his employer, a joint venture of Philips Electronics and Lucent Technologies (owner of Bell Labs).
At Motorola, Garriques made a name for himself as the London-based head of Motorola’s wireless phone operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. When he started in 2002, competitors in Europe “were running circles around Motorola,” said analyst Lin. “They were getting beaten up.”
Garriques had a reputation as a “hard driving,” “tough” and downright “inflexible” manager at times in Europe, said Lin, who has talked to Motorola executives who worked with Garriques there.
“Sometimes [those traits] can be terrible,” Lin said. “But Motorola was in a state where those kind of characteristics were helping the company.”
In the next two years, courtesy of better products and Garriques’ disciplined management, Motorola was able to turn things around in Europe, said Lin and other analysts.
“I think Wall Street thinks [Garriques] did a pretty decent job in Europe,” said Ed Snyder, an analyst at Charter Equity Research.
Garriques is regarded as a plain-spoken “bread and butter guy” by analysts and the investment community, Snyder said.
“We know the guys who have an understanding of what they are talking about” and those who are faking,” Snyder said. “When you talk to him, he seems to know what he’s talking about.”
Edward Zander, who became Motorola’s chief executive in January 2004, picked Garriques to head the company’s wireless phone division in September 2004.
Garriques started the job at a time when Wall Street’s faith in Motorola, battered before Zander arrived, was being restored. So was consumer interest in Motorola’s phones.
With sales soaring, Motorola’s share of the global mobile phone business jumped to 18 percent from around 14 percent in the nine months ending June 30 without sacrificing profitability.
Garriques said recapturing enough share to overtake Nokia and make Motorola No. 1, its ranking until the late 1990s, is not unreasonable.
Motorola has a strong brand, he said. It is bolstering efforts to sell low-priced phones in developing countries. And it has a crop of higher-end phones due out this fall that have generated lots of buzz.
Still, while analysts praise the direction Garriques is heading, several said his goal of catching Nokia is a long shot.
“It’s certainly ambitious,” said Roger Entner, a wireless analyst with Ovum, a market research firm. “If the stars are right, and the wind is from behind, and [Garriques] gets kissed by fairies, he can make it.
“But to retake Nokia, everything on his side has to work out. A lot of things on Nokia’s side have to go wrong.”
Those ambitious goals extend to Garriques latest home renovation project too.
When he moved back to Illinois from Europe, he and his wife, Karena, bought a 14,000-square-foot house designed by famed Chicago-born architect Howard Van Doren Shaw.
Their goal is to restore the house, which overlooks Lake Michigan, to the style and appearance it originally sported but with modern conveniences.
Garriques spends weekends combing antique stores for vintage fixtures.
“Antique lighting is kind of my thing,” he said recently as he walked through a room filled with building materials. The room is being restored to its original purpose: billiards.
Some parts of the house are finished, while others won’t be done for at least five years.
This will be Garriques fourth and likely his last restoration project. He and Karena plan to raise their two young children in the house.
It’s also his biggest project. The house cost $9.5 million, and the rule of thumb for museum-quality restorations is that they usually cost about the same as the house, Garriques said.
“It’s a huge stretch.”
But he approaches the restoration like he would any big decision at Motorola.
“The bets I make are really, really well thought out.”
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Ron Garriques at a glance
Position: Motorola executive vice president and president of the company’s mobile devices business, based in Libertyville
Age: 41
Residence: Lake Forest
Hometown: Hackettstown, N.J.
Former employers: Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies
Education: Bachelor’s degree, engineering, Boston University; master’s degree, engineering, Stanford University; MBA from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School
Other positions: Member of Boston University’s board of trustees; board member of United Way of Lake County
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Motorola looking sharp with new Razr
Sales of Motorola Inc.’s sleek Razr mobile phone have raced past expectations.
The Razr, an ultrathin phone fashioned from aircraft-grade aluminum, arrived in stores in November with a $499 price tag. Motorola figured it would be a superpremium, “relatively low-moving product,” said Ron Garriques, president of Motorola’s mobile devices business.
Sales of about 500,000 to 750,000 Razrs per quarter were projected. In Razr’s inaugural quarter, Motorola easily hit the high end of that range. Seeing strong demand, Garriques boosted production.
Razr sales doubled in the next quarter and doubled again during the quarter ending June 30, Garriques said. A similar strong performance is on tap for the recently completed third quarter.
“The success of the Razr has confounded and beaten all traditional sales records of high-end phones,” said Roger Entner, an analyst with Ovum, a market research firm.
The phone has burnished Motorola’s image and appears to have had a “halo effect,” boosting sales of all Motorola phones. In the past nine months, Motorola’s share of the global mobile phone business jumped to 18 percent from around 14 percent.
But last year’s darling quickly can become this year’s laggard, said Albert Lin, an analyst with American Technology Research.
“It’s very hard to come up with hit after hit after hit, year after year after year,” he said.
Motorola’s much-anticipated Rokr phone, a venture with Apple Computer Inc., has gotten off to a slow start, according to a report released last week by Mike Walkley, a Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst.
The phone, which allows users to download songs from Apple’s iTunes Web site, arrived in stores Sept. 8. Walkley surveyed more than 100 phone retailers nationally and found that while some stores noted strong early sales of Rokr, more were “indicating disappointment in the product.”
Still, Walkley and other analysts are encouraged by Motorola’s fall phone lineup. It includes the Slvr, a blade-like phone with styling similar to the Razr, and the Pebl, a model with round, smooth lines.
Also, a CDMA (code division multiple access) version of the Razr is due out by early 2006. Phones using CDMA are offered by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp.
— Mike Hughlett
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mhughlett@tribune.com
