Motorola seems to be in a bit of trouble. The American multinational faces a very tough battle to boost its sales amid a global economic crisis and the company doesn’t expect a very impressive result for the current quarter.    

There was no enthusiasm on Thursday at Motorola’s quarterly conference call as the company, which has had two very tough past years, hinted that a major comeback wouldn’t be achievable until early 2010. The financial state of the company is so grave lately that the management decided to delay a long-awaited restructuring of the company’s handset division in order to produce some handsets that will attract consumers.

Besides a tumbling global economy, Motorola will also have to face a very tough competition as Apple and Research In Motion are coming up with products that are currently way hotter than what Motorola has to offer.

However, there is still hope, and many of it now lays on Motorola’s new star co-CEO Sanjay Jha.

"We're either witnessing a slow death here, or the darkest night before the dawn," Sam Wilson, senior analyst at JMP Securities, nicely put it.

"But one thing is clear this is a company royally screwed up in a brutally competitive market. And it won't be easy to turn things around," he added for CNet.com.

One of the main current problems at Motorola seems to be innovation and conception. The handset manufacturer hasn’t come up with a hit phone since 2004 when it launched the successful Razr. Moreover, the Schaumburg, Illinois-based company seems to have missed the major shift in the handset market. The trend is clear as day light: consumers are moving away from traditional feature-based cell phones and toward smartphones, like iPhone, G1, Blackberry Storm and many others.

Motorola hasn’t entirely missed the shift, but its Motorola Q was easily eclipsed by what producers like Apple and Research In Motion had to offer.

"The market essentially moved without them," Wilson said. "There is very little growth left in the standard feature phone market. And when you think of a smartphone, you think iPhone or BlackBerry. You don't think Motorola Q."

As for the company’s new Co-CEO, Mr. Jha said that Motorola would soon drop at least four operating systems, including Symbian, and will focus on developing Android- and Windows Mobile-running products. However, the move will need time and that resource, once lost, can never be recovered. By the time Motorola makes the planned changes, Apple and RIM will surely have launched new products on the market.

Let’s hope Motorola recovers from this, but considering all the elements in the equation, the future doesn’t look that bright for the company that came up with the world's first-only commercial cellular device - the DynaTAC 8000X.