Lenovo completes Motorola purchase for $2.9bn – $10bn less than Google paid for it Three years ago, Google splashed out $12.5bn for struggling mobe manufacturer Motorola, and on Thursday the Chocolate Factory completed its sale of Motorola's physical assets to Lenovo for just $2.91bn. Not all of the money will be going into Google's coffers right away, however. Lenovo is paying $660m in cash plus $750m in …
Don't forget the tax breaks Google got from Motorola as well
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/30/google_motorola_mobility_lenovo_sale/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/01/google_buys_tax_breaks_along_with_mobility/
And Forbes thinks its only $1.5 Billion http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/12/22/did-motorola-mobility-only-cost-google-1-5-billion/ if so Google made a nice profit and got a load of patents as well.
There was also the sale of Motorola's set-top business for $2.35bn:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/google_sells_moto_tv_business/
Really?
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but when I think of Motorola I think of the past, ICs and car radios and that's pretty much it. I don't think Motorola has much brand awareness in the UK at all, certainly not with the general public.
I'm pretty sure that everyone was going nuts over the Motorola RAZR a few years back. Certainly in mobile phones they have an awareness (though less so in the post iPhone smartphone world).
Admittedly I'll struggle to name anything else they make apart from mobile phones, the smartwatch I've just blown my bunce money on and heavy duty police radios but at the moment that's probably enough for them to market with.
Whether it's enough to compete with Apple/Samsung for mobile device market share is a different kettle of surprisingly intelligent fish.
Don't forget Freetards... Motorola had 3 BEEELLION (as El Reg would say) cash on hand when Google bought them. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-lose-on-its-original-motorola-deal/?_r=0
So add that to all the tax write-offs, the sale of the set-top business and now this...
Oh and the fact that Google didn't just keep the Patents it kept the 'secret' high tech division of Motorola, and this starts to look like a pretty darn good deal.
Motorola's cell phone division cost Motorola many times more in losses over the past
10 years than it did to Google.
Motorola would have been far better off if it gave away the cell phone business 8 years ago.
Had Motorola poured money into it's networks business and commercial Wi-Fi business,
instead of cutting back development in those businesses while it tried to turn around the
cell phone business, it would be worth a lot more today.
A quick check of Amazon shows that Moto have been the top seller for about a year. Currently #1, most wished for and most gifted. Then there't the watch that actually looks like a watch rather then the 1970's on your wrist.
Stick some Lenovo scale into the mix and they could do well. FSM knows the mobile space needs to have the current duopoly broken.
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