Google sold Motorola to Chinese Lenovo

Google has signed an agreement with Lenovo on the sale of Motorola for 2.91 billion dollars. At the same time, Google will retain ownership of the overwhelming number of patents (about 17,000), which it acquired after buying Motorola in 2012 for $ 12.5 billion. After the announcement of the deal, Google shares jumped a few percent.

After buying Google, Motorola continued to operate as an independent enterprise and in the fall of 2013 released the flagship smartphone Moto X. The device was well received by the market, but sales volumes are unknown. Later, the company began to gradually reduce its price.

Motorola's revenues continue to decline year on year. In the third quarter of 2013, the company earned $ 1.18 billion, which is 0.6 billion less than the figure for the same period of the previous year. Today, Google should publish financial results for the IV quarter.

The deal was announced by Google CEO Larry Page in the company's blog:

Literally, we just signed an agreement to sell Lenovo’s Motorola for $ 2.91 billion. This is an important event for every Android user.

In the smartphone market, there was intense competition. Lenovo is rapidly developing its smartphone business and is the largest personal computer maker in the world. This step will allow Google to focus on innovation through the Android ecosystem in the interest of all smartphone users.

Lenovo has everything you need to turn Motorola into a big player within the Android ecosystem. The company has extensive experience in the manufacture of hardware and a large coverage area. In addition, Lenovo intends to keep the Motorola brand following the example of the ThinkPad, which it bought from IBM in 2005. Google will keep most of its Motorola patents, which will be used to further protect the Android ecosystem.

Despite the fact that Google gets for Motorola much less than it paid for it several years ago, the company will not lose. Saved patents may be licensed to third parties by Google.

To date, the largest manufacturer of Android-based smartphones in the world is the South Korean company Samsung. The latter recently entered into an agreement with Google for the exchange of patents for 10 years. According to some reports, Samsung also agreed to expand the number of Google services in its Android smartphones.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/phone/google-prodala-motorola-kitajskoj-lenovo.html.