The US mobile phone maker Motorola announced that its CEO Ed Zander will step down in January 2008. Ed Zander, 60, took over at Motorola in January 2004. Previous to Motorola, Ed Zander had worked at a number of Silicon Valley firms, including Data Systems, Apollo Computers and Sun Microsystems.

Zander will be replaced by COO Greg Brown, Motorola said. Prior to his role as President and COO, Mr. Brown headed four different businesses at Motorola.

Ed Zander would continue to serve as head of the board of directors until the annual general stockholders meeting next May.

The move comes after a year of disappointing results as the company failed to follow on from the earlier success of its slim-line cell phone the RAZR.

Under Zander’s leadership, the company sold more than 100 million units of the RAZR over three years, making it the best-selling cellphone in the history of the industry.

But at the end of the third quarter, Motorola had fallen to third place in mobile phone market share, behind Samsung Electronics Co and Nokia. The company now has just a 13.1 per cent share of the global market, compared with 20.7 per cent a year ago, when it was number 2, according to Gartner Research.

In a statement, Motorola board of directors lead director Samuel C Scott III thanked Zander "for his vision, expertise and tireless commitment to Motorola. We greatly appreciate his many contributions and wish him all the best in the years ahead."

In an interview for Reuters, Ed Zander, who has been in the technology industry for 40 years, insisted that his departure was entirely of his own choice. "[It was] my date, my doing, my time frame," he said.