An Associated Press reporter holds the Droid X, the latest addition to Motorola Inc’s smart phone line, during a product review June 30 in San Francisco. For decades, Motorola’s products told the story of the march of electronics into the hands of consumers: car radios in the 1930s, TVs in the 1940s and cell phones in the 1980s.

New York ? For decades, Motorola Inc.’s products told the story of the march of electronics into the hands of consumers: car radios in the 1930s, TVs in the 1940s and cell phones starting the 1980s.

Now, the iconic company is breaking up, the victim of changing markets and the need to present simpler stories to investors.

Motorola’s cell phone business, which as late as 2007 was riding high on the success of the Razr, is struggling to reshape itself. And its survival may ride on whether it succeeds in turning a once-mass-market cell phone business into a much smaller mold, focused on playing in the same niche as Apple Inc.’s popular iPhone.

Early next year, Motorola is slated to separate the business that makes cell phones and set-top boxes from the one that makes police radios and bar-code scanners, Enterprise Mobility.

In a prelude to that split, Motorola announced Monday that it is selling the bulk of its wireless networks division for $1.2 billion to Nokia Siemens Networks, freeing Enterprise Mobility from a Networks business that has been holding it back in the eyes of investors.

Enterprise Mobility is the part of Motorola that’s currently doing the best — what Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt calls the company’s “crown jewel.” Its customers are police departments, government agencies and big retailers, putting it outside the view of consumers.

Its roots also stretch back further than any other Motorola business: the company, then called Galvin Manufacturing, sold its first two-way police radio system in 1940 to the police department in Bowling Green, Ky.

By contrast, Networks, which supplies equipment to wireless carriers, has an aging product portfolio and is too small to compete in today’s global market. Wireless carriers have been consolidating into larger companies and now prefer to deal with only a couple of equipment vendors each, narrowing the scope for small suppliers such as Motorola.

The point of one company making both cell phones and the equipment that connects their calls has diminished as well.

The industry was pioneered by Motorola, LM Ericsson AB and other companies that made both phones and network equipment. But with increasing standardization of the technology, there is no longer much synergy; any phone will connect to a compatible network.

So Ericsson spun its handset business into a joint venture with Sony Corp., and Nokia Corp. of Finland combined its networks business with Siemens AG of Germany to form a joint venture that focuses on handsets.

In the hunt for scale, the other big U.S. supplier of network equipment, Lucent, was bought by the French company Alcatel in 2006. Canada’s Nortel Networks filed for bankruptcy in 2009, shortly after it was said to have discussed joining its networks business to Motorola’s. Ericsson and Nokia Siemens networks ended up buying parts of Nortel.

Meanwhile, developments on the cell phone side are being driven by companies that don’t make network equipment at all, including Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd., creator of the BlackBerry.

That blindsided Motorola, which made the cell phones for the launch of the first commercial network in the U.S. in 1983 and parlayed its design skill into a worldwide franchise.

Shrinking sales

Late in 2004, it launched the Razr phone, a slim “clamshell” that became the most iconic phone of the time and a best-seller. Going into 2007, Motorola was still the world’s second-largest maker of phones, after Nokia. Phones made up two-thirds of its revenue.

But the Razr was getting old, and Motorola was scrambling to come up with a successor that could fill its shoes. Nothing took hold. Motorola’s sales started cratering.

What made the implosion worse was that even at its peak, Motorola was not an efficient manufacturer in the manner of Nokia, and it didn’t have very good margins. When sales shrank, losses piled up very quickly.

Pressured by corporate raider Carl Icahn, Motorola crafted a plan to split off the phone business and hired Sanjay Jha, the chief operating officer of Qualcomm, in 2008 to run that unit. Investors like a clear story, and splitting the phone business from the rest would make both parts easier to value, the thinking went.

But the cell phone business tanked even further, and it soon became clear that investors would not value it at all as long as it was posting huge losses. The split was postponed, and Jha embarked on a program to focus Motorola in the highest-margin sector of the phone business: smart phones.

Motorola’s smart phone sales have been modest compared with Apple’s, and they haven’t been able to reverse the sales slide of the division.