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Slashdot Asks: Why Does Google Want To Purchase HTC? (bloomberg.com)
Rumor has it Google is planning to purchase HTC -- or at least a portion of it. The speculation of this has been doing rounds for weeks now, and it reached a new high today after HTC said its stock will stop trading from Thursday, as it prepares to make a "major announcement" tomorrow. Bloomberg reported today: Alphabet's Google is close to acquiring assets from Taiwan's HTC, according to a person familiar with the situation, in a bid to bolster the internet giant's nascent hardware business. HTC, once ranked among the world's top smartphone makers, is holding a town hall meeting Thursday, according to tech website Venture Beat, which cited a copy of an internal invitation. The shares will also be suspended from trading as of Sept. 21 due to a pending announcement, according to the Taiwan stock exchange. Of course Google has made similar moves in the past. It previously owned Motorola for a brief period of time, but that acquisition didn't materialize much. The company has however, since re-hired the Motorola chief it once had, Rick Osterloh, and founded a separate hardware team under his stewardship. Claude Zellweger, the one-time chief designer of HTC Vive, is also now at Google, working on that company's Daydream virtual reality system.
What reasons could Google have to purchase HTC? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
What reasons could Google have to purchase HTC? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
You misspelled patents.
In 2011, VIA technologies sold its graphics subsidary "S3" to HTC, my guess is the are actually interrested in the Graphics Patents and knowledge from S3.
which state the obvious. 1) That HTC is a competitor in the same phone space and that 2) Google has money to burn.
There's a third reason.
Google doesn't know how to innovate anymore. They've gone as far as they can with computers as they are and don't want to sink time and money into finding the next new thing. Instead they're going through a retrenching so that profitability remains relatively high while seeking as many monopoly positions as they can. They already have search and internet advertisement sewn up. The US doesn't have the will to establish a new regulatory regime and the EU doesn't currently have the reach to force the US into following their course. That may change by the time President Stupid is done but that's for the future to decide.
In the meantime, the smart move is for Google to gobble up as much as it can under their Alphabet umbrella and see which keeps bringing in the money.
Google, well Alphabet really, wants money. It turns out, that if you make and sell things, you can get money!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Plus it gets the IP & knowledge base built on the patents, and the people that did it.
HTC used to make pretty decent devices, and I'm sure there's still some guys here who remember how its done.
It's sometimes much faster and cheaper to buy a team of talented designers and engineers, PMs etc. rather than build from scratch.
They also get all of HTC's licensed agreements too. IIRC HTC had licensing deals for IP with Nokia, Microsoft, and Apple.
I doubt that's the case, unless they had some really odd licensing agreements. Licenses are (almost) always written to be non-transferrable for exactly this reason, so $bigcompany can't acquire them through the back door by buying $smallcompany.