With Motorola sale, Google unloads a headache
By selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, Google is ending a combination that never really worked out while keeping assets that could prove valuable down the road.
In a deal announced on Wednesday, Lenovo agreed to buy the venerable handset maker for US$2.91 billion, pending regulatory approval. That's far less than the $12.5 billion that Google paid for Motorola in 2011, even counting what it already got for selling off the company's set-top-box business. But Google will retain most of Motorola's patents, potentially a valuable warchest in the lawsuit-strewn mobile industry.
More importantly, the search giant will get out of a business that never helped it compete or make money and hurt its relationships with other Android phone manufacturers, industry analysts said. "Google didn't really have to buy Motorola and probably should not have bought Motorola," said analyst Avi Greengart of Current Analysis.
