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Google Sells Motorola Mobility To Lenovo For $2.91 Billion
_0x783czar writes "Google today announced that they will be selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for the sum of $2.91 billion USD. Google says the move should allow the company to receive the attention and focus it deserves in order to thrive. From the announcement: '[T]he smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices. It's why we believe that Motorola will be better served by Lenovo — which has a rapidly growing smartphone business and is the largest (and fastest-growing) PC manufacturer in the world. This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere.' Google was quick to add that this does not signal a move away from their other hardware projects. Additionally Google will 'retain the vast majority of Motorola's patents,' which they hope to continue using to stabilize the Android ecosystem. The deal has yet to be approved by either the U.S. or China."
Yes, spot on.
17,000 patents, plus another 7,500 pending. Also, the patents were higher quality patents, so it just was not the numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Maybe you missed the part about them keeping the patents. This is part of their strategic goals of supporting Android without having to bother with managing a phone company.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Not really. They sold various other parts in the past for cash, and got tax writeoffs. Forbes estimates it only really cost them 1.5 billion in cash. With this deal they made money, and likely kept the patents.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They didn't "rent" anything -- they paid $10 billion for Motorola's patents. The rest wasn't worth much to them.
According to this Google+ post, it wasn't that bad. Motorola came to Google with $5.6B in cash and deferred tax assets, plus Google recovered some more of their money by selling the set-top box business ($2.35) and some factories ($75M), and finally the sale price to Lenovo ($2.91B).
So the net cost was about $1.56B. For that Google got most of the Motorola patents and Motorola's advanced products group. Good deal? Bad deal? You decide.
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