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."

Re:ouch!

[mythosaz]

Yeah. I need to get in the middle of one of these transactions somehow.

Google seems willing to pay 10B to rent companies for a while...

Google shift in strategy, make others build better

[SuperKendall]

As much as they might say they are still building hardware - obviously not to the same degree.

Instead Google is focusing on making other hardware makers produce better Android devices, the evidence of which is the smack-down Google gave Samsung at CES [recode.net].

That explains the Samsung deal

[jonabbey]

Well, that nicely explains why Samsung announced that they were willing to work more closely with Google to make Samsung phones cohere to Google's direction with Android.

Re:A great American company sold to China

[adolf]

Motorola has a distinguished history as a great American company. It was founded in 1928 and outlasted all its electronics contemporaries from that era, including RCA and Dumont. It had a great hit in the Razr (the iPhone before the iPhone). Now Google has sold Motorola to China.

Nope.

Motorola Solutions is still based in the Illinois, making top-tier wireless communications gear for commercial and public safety sectors.

All that has been sold to China is what used to be the Crappy Consumer Products/Race to the Bottom division of Motorola:

Re:ouch!

[bob_super]

Actually, owning Moto put them in an uncomfortable situation with the other Android phone makers.
If Google doesn't make hardware phones, there's less incentive to go fork your own android.

So they paid 10 billions for patents, give Moto to someone who can both invest in it and leverage the Chinese market, and avoid a war with their customers.

Decent deal.

Wow. Major shopping spree

[msobkow]

That's a pretty big shopping spree Lenovo has been on. I sure hope it pays off for them -- I like their hardware, despite all the naysayers out there, I've never had problems with their stuff yet.

Good for Android... not sure about Motorola

[jareth-0205]

Gotta say this is probably a better state for Android to be in from a "standard platform" point of view, a company making hardware and licencing its software to other hardware manufacturers hasn't work out very well in computing in the past. Either own the lot (Apple) or provide yourself as a service but don't compete (Microsoft pre-Surface). If you compete and licence, you end up being Apple during the clone years, or Palm. Companies might take a free ride on a crocodile, but they'll get off when they can cause it's not very safe...

Lenovo has done a decent job with Thinkpad, so it's not entirely doom for Moto either.

Re:ouch!

[cbhacking]

Pretty sure Microsoft will only shut down the Nokia handset manufacturing (there's more to Nokia than that, but I don't have a handy name for it like "Motorola Mobility") if they decide to abandon the smartphone OS business entirely. Which they could do, admittedly, but I'd be surprised. They've achieved a pretty solid third place in the market, with an overall marketshare similar to that of OS X among PCs. They've started being taken more seriously by major app developers. They're rolling out updates at a decent rate, and many of the crippling issues of the app model in WP7 are already fixed.

That doesn't mean they won't spin off or re-sell that portion of the business, of course. I'd be surprised if they just killed it though, unless they want to give up on phone OSes entirely. There are at least three other OEMs making WP8 handsets (HTC, Samsung, and Huawei), but the Nokia Lumia line predominates.