Google is getting rid of bad assets in this sale, as Motorola lost a Billion in this past year, which is a 34% slump for the manufacturer(They are doing what Blackberry should have done). Back in 2011, Google promised $12.5 Billion to Motorola which included not only the devices, but their patents. The price Lenovo is paying is $2.91 Billion, MUCH lower than what google was supposed to pay, but allegedly Google is holding on to a good bit of the patents, and some ‘other intellectual property’.
The deal is as follows:
$660 million in cash, $750 million worth of Lenovo stock and $1.5 billion in the form of a three-year promissory note. Lenovo gets the Motorola brand and current and future products, such as the Moto X smartphone. It also gets more than 2,000 patents and the Motorola trademark portfolio.
Since Motorola is now not under Google, Google stock has gone up in after hours trading.
Lenovo is a Chinese company, known for their PC’s, and may very well make Motorola get back into the device driver seat, BUT while Google had the company, they got the top engineering talent, as well as most of the key technology patents that help them build on top of.
The major issue is Lenovo is NOT based in the US, so unless Motorola employees are moving to mainland China, 1000 Jobs will be lost. See Gallery
