In an unexpected move, the Wall Street Journal reports that Motorola is considering exiting its Home & Wireless Mobility business unit. The report adds that the company is expecting a valuation of $ 4.5 billion for this division which managed sales of $2.1 billion and profit of $ 199 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2009.

The report says Motorola plans to continue with the Enterprise and the Mobile Devices division.

As per the report, the company has initiated talks with investment firms and competing vendors.

Motorola’s plans to sell-off its business division started couple of years back with talks of the firm exiting its mobile devices unit. But the company roped in Sanjay Jha to affect a turn around as there were no buyers for the unit.

In recent quarters this division has indeed posted positive trends and looks set to come out of red next year.

The Home & Wireless Mobility division includes IPTV solution offerings primarily the set-top boxes division.

Huawei, NSN, Ericsson, Samsung and Pace are reported to be likely interested in acquiring Motorola’s business division under consideration. Huawei and NSN appear more logical and strong contenders. Huawei is focusing on penetrating deep into the North America market. Also acquiring Motorola’s wireless division may give it the required edge to come at par with European vendor Ericsson. On the managed services front, the acquisition will give it an edge over NSN.

NSN too should be equally interested because it recently lost out to Ericsson in acquiring Nortel’s business unit.

For Ericsson even though the opportunity sounds appealing it will be financially challenging to explore it as it had to shell out $ 1.3 billion to acquire Nortel’s CDMA assets.