For Motorola (MOT), the darkest days may still lie ahead.

Tero Kuittinen, an analyst with Global Crown Capital, this morning repeated his Underweight rating on Motorola, and cut his price target on the shares to $2.50, from $3.50. He thinks the company will miss its Q4 guidance, and fall short of the 2009 consensus “by a wide margin.” In short, Kuittinen contends that “Motorola is now on the verge of losing its status as a global handset brand.”

Kuittinen says that recent discussions with AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) “imply a clear slowdown in sales, just as the level of U.S. competition is vaulting to a new level with the launches of LG Incite, Samsung Eternity and other appealing and conspicuously cheap November debuts.”

Read the rest of this post

More risk remains for Garmin (GRMN) and TomTom (TOM2.AS), the two leading providers of personal navigation devices. That’s the conclusion of Pablo Perez-Fernandez, an analyst at Global Crown Capital, in San Francisco. Perez-Fernandez picked up coverage of both companies this morning with an Underweight rating, asserting that both stocks could drop 20 percent or more over the next six months. He notes that the GPS device business is “under stress from competition, suffering a major slowdown and under the threat of the mighty smartphone.”

He contends there is a “strong likelihood” that both companies could miss their full year 2008 guidance given light PND unit shipments. “We see downside around the next two earnings calls,” he writes, with the fourth quarter posing particular risk.

Read the rest of this post