No matter how many surplus crew members are thrown overboard, there comes a point with any foundering ship when it is time to accept the inevitable. Motorola is bailing furiously but, even if it can patch the holes in its mobile phone operations, the danger is that, by the time it has some decent new handsets to sell, the competition will already be over the horizon.

The scale of the challenge was again clear on Wednesday evening, when the group warned that fourth quarter sales were worse than feared. Unit sales halved compared with a year ago. Motorola’s share of the global market has shrunk from over a fifth in 2006, to just 6 per cent now. With a new 3G phone using Google’s Android operating system unlikely to hit the shelves until Christmas, further deterioration and losses seems likely.