Motorola finds new counter for shrinking pile of beans

Motorola President and CEO Greg Brown added another piece to the company’s new management team on Friday with the announcement that Paul Liska will become executive vice president and CFO.

Liska, who has been a partner in several private equity firms and played financial and general executive roles in transportation, publishing and retail companies, will take over Motorola’s finances on March 1. Tom Meredith, who has been acting CFO since last year, will remain on Motorola’s board and help Liska with the transition, the company said in a statement. It praised Meredith for cost-cutting efforts.

Motorola’s last permanent CFO, David Devonshire, resigned last March. The company had run into rough waters after it failed to come up with a popular successor to the slim Razr clamshell phone. Former President and CEO Ed Zander handed those two jobs over to Brown in November, though he remains chairman until the next Motorola shareholder meeting in May.

Since Brown took Zander’s place, CTO Padmasree Warrior has also left, and the company has said it might spin off its handset business.

Motorola has fallen behind both Nokia and Samsung in the hotly contested mobile-phone market, but its handset division still brought in $4.8 billion of the company’s $9.6 billion revenue in the fourth quarter of last year. The company as a whole saw revenue fall from $11.8 billion a year earlier and earnings per share drop to $0.04 from $0.25.