Symbol Technologies
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Symbol Technologies is an American manufacturer and supplier of mobile data capture and delivery equipment. The company specializes in
barcode scanner A barcode reader is an optical scanner that can read printed barcodes, decode the data contained in the barcode to a computer. Like a flatbed scanner, it consists of a light source, a lens and a light sensor for translating optical impulses int ...
s,
mobile computer Mobile computing is human–computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for the transmission of data, voice, and video. Mobile computing involves mobile communication, mobile hardware ...
s, RFID systems and
Wireless LAN A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network that links two or more devices using wireless communication to form a local area network (LAN) within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, campus, or office buildi ...
infrastructure. In 2014, Symbol Technologies became a subsidiary of
Zebra Technologies Zebra Technologies Corporation is an American mobile computing company specializing in technology used to sense, analyze, and act in real time. The company manufactures and sells marking, tracking, and computer printing technologies. Its product ...
, and is headquartered in
Holtsville, New York Holtsville is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in Suffolk County, on Long Island, in New York, United States. The population was 19,714 at the 2010 census. The hamlet is mainly in the Town of Brookhaven, while the southwestern portion ...
, on Long Island.


History


Before 2000

The company was co-founded in 1973 by Jerome Swartz and physicist Shelley A. Harrison. At that time, the company focused on handheld laser based scanning of bar codes. Under Swartz, the company marketed handheld laser bar code scanning devices. The company focused heavily on the retail industry and began to get involved in inventory management. These activities typically required people to scan items where they are stored and as such needed to be mobile. Symbol began to make small computers that could store data scanned to take inventory counts remotely and then upload the information gathered to a host system. This was the rationale for the September 1988 purchase of MSI Data Corporation, a mobile computer company that was headquartered in southern California, for $120 million. The mobile computers being manufactured at the time relied on static memory (in this case SRAM) for execution space and general storage. SRAM was extremely expensive and the team determined that it would be an improvement to use a radio to allow the mobile computer to be untethered but connected to the host system. A thin client architecture was adopted in conjunction with a spread spectrum radio network. The enterprise mobility management market was dominated by Symbol Technologies and Telxon, Inc. Most notably, these two companies serviced major retailers such as
Wal-Mart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...
,
Kroger The Kroger Company, or simply Kroger, is an American retail company that operates (either directly or through its subsidiaries) supermarkets and multi-department stores throughout the United States. Founded by Bernard Kroger in 1883 in Cinci ...
,
Safeway Safeway is an American supermarket chain founded by Marion Barton Skaggs in April 1915 in American Falls, Idaho. The chain provides grocery items, food and general merchandise and features a variety of specialty departments, such as bakery, d ...
, Federated and others. A notable turning point occurred in 1994 with a competition for business at Kroger. Symbol Technologies and Telxon were operating radio networks in the 2.4 GHz ISM bands.
IEEE 802.11 IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer commun ...
was not yet ratified, so Symbol and Telxon were free to define competing standards of communication at this frequency band. Symbol settled on
frequency hopping Frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) is a method of transmitting radio signals by rapidly changing the carrier frequency among many distinct frequencies occupying a large spectral band. The changes are controlled by a code known to both tra ...
as the most robust, agile and interference-tolerant approach to data communications while Telxon selected direct sequence technology which they felt afforded higher transfer speeds with adequate interference immunity. Kroger ordered a head-to-head comparison test. Ultimately and not decisively, Kroger chose Telxon. At about the same time, the IEEE decided to adopt the direct sequence approach in its IEEE 802.11b standard. The ratification of IEEE 802.11b was a huge blow to the Symbol team which now had to reconfigure and engineer a direct sequence radio system. This was accomplished with great pains and IEEE 802.11b became a reality in the industrial and commercial markets far before the radios were available to the consumer market. The addition of a radio to a mobile device was roughly estimated to have a real value of between $500 and $1000 per unit. This was paid by enterprise customers that desperately needed this feature to accomplish their operations. Later on Symbol started to sell the radios as PC Cards as a stand-alone product to various
original equipment manufacturer An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...
s (OEMs) and private label customers. These included
3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe e ...
,
Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...
and
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
. The Symbol team had temporarily dominated the IEEE 802.11b market. Telxon was facing difficulties and, in the meantime, Intel,
Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
and
Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...
were looking at the technology to see how they would use this to their commercial advantage. Cisco investigated the acquisition of various manufacturers of wireless gear to augment their commanding position in the wired infrastructure field. Cisco performed due diligence with both Symbol and Telxon, deciding to purchase the Aironet component of Telxon that designed and manufactured the radios. The Cisco purchase of Telxon's Aironet division marked the inflection point of the market moving from a specialized, esoteric market to a mass consumer and enterprise market. In June 1998, Telxon rejected a hostile takeover bid of $668 million made by Symbol. The ensuing
proxy battle A proxy fight, proxy contest or proxy battle (sometimes even called a proxy war) is an unfriendly contest for the control over an organization. The event usually occurs when a corporation's stockholders develop opposition to some aspect of the corp ...
lasted two years, and in December 2000 Symbol was able to complete the takeover at a much lower price of $465 million. In 2004 Symbol acquired Matrics, helping the company to push further into the RFID field.


Accounting fraud and acquisition by Motorola

In 2002, Tomo Razmilovic, who succeeded Swartz as CEO in 2000, abruptly retired in the midst of a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into Symbol's accounting practices. A few months later, an internal inquiry revealed a wide-ranging
accounting fraud Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the measurement, processing, and communication of financial and non financial information about economic entities such as businesses and corporations. Accounting, which has been called the "language ...
that had begun in 1998 and only ended in early 2002. Following this revelation, Symbol cooperated fully with the SEC investigation, as well as with a separate federal criminal probe by the
United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York The United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York is the chief federal law enforcement officer in five New York counties: Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Richmond (Staten Island), Nassau and Suffolk. The current U.S. Attorney is Breon Pe ...
. On June 3, 2004, Razmilovic and seven other former Symbol executives were indicted on charges that they orchestrated a wide-ranging scheme to inflate the company's sales and profits. It included several types of fraud, such as
channel stuffing Channel stuffing is a business practice in which a company, or a sales force within a company, inflates its sales figures by forcing more products through a distribution channel than the channel is capable of selling. Also known as trade loading, ...
(booking sales to wholesalers and distributors as final sales to customers), candy deals (selling products to distributors with no matching customer orders and then buying the products back), use of tango sheets (records of how much revenues had to be inflated to match quarterly targets) and use of cookie jar reserves (declaring nonrecurring expenses that far exceeded likely expenses). On the same day, Razmilovic and 10 other former executives were sued by the SEC for the fraud. In late 2002, Symbol restated almost four years of earnings from 1998 to 2001, in the process erasing $234 million in revenue and $325 million in net income. It also paid $37 million to settle the SEC charges and $138 million to settle numerous shareholder suits. Eventually, four former executives pleaded guilty, and seven former executives settled SEC charges against them. Several of those who pleaded guilty stated under oath that Razmilovic was the mastermind of the fraud. Razmilovic fled to Sweden, where he has citizenship, shortly before his indictment. He remains a fugitive as of 2017; he claims he will not voluntarily return to face the charges against him because he does not believe he can get a fair trial in the United States. Sweden will not give him up for
extradition Extradition is an action wherein one jurisdiction delivers a person accused or convicted of committing a crime in another jurisdiction, over to the other's law enforcement. It is a cooperative law enforcement procedure between the two jurisdi ...
because it does not extradite suspected white-collar criminals outside the
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...
. Symbol never recovered from the fraud, and in 2007 was acquired by Motorola for $3.9 billion. The company essentially took over Motorola's enterprise division; it was far larger than the pre-merger division. Symbol remained part of
Motorola Solutions Motorola Solutions, Inc., is an American video equipment, telecommunications equipment, software, systems and services provider that succeeded Motorola, Inc., following the spinoff of the mobile phone division into Motorola Mobility in 2011. Th ...
, the legal successor to the old Motorola, after the company spun off its mobile phone division as Motorola Mobility.


Acquisition by Zebra Technologies

In October 2014
Zebra Technologies Zebra Technologies Corporation is an American mobile computing company specializing in technology used to sense, analyze, and act in real time. The company manufactures and sells marking, tracking, and computer printing technologies. Its product ...
acquired Motorola Solutions' enterprise business which included Symbol Technologies for $3.45 billion in cash.


References


External links


Symbol Dividend History


{{Authority control Motorola Electronics companies of the United States Radio-frequency identification companies Companies based in Suffolk County, New York Manufacturing companies based in New York (state) Electronics companies established in 1975 2007 mergers and acquisitions 2014 mergers and acquisitions Accounting scandals