Google is to become a fully fledged handset maker following a $12.5 billion deal to buy Motorola Mobility, the terminal part of the former giant telecoms group.
The deal will be seen to justify Motorola’s decision in 2008 to adopt Google’s Android operating system.
Google CEO Larry Page said: “It was a smart bet and we’re thrilled at the success they’ve achieved so far. We believe that their mobile business is on an upward trajectory and poised for explosive growth.”
The company noted that Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and said that the Android operating system will remain open. But the deal is bound to worry some other vendors of Android handsets as they watch the Google giant starting to compete with them in the telecoms stores.
The deal also means that Motorola Mobility stays in US-controlled hands — almost the last of the country’s telecoms vendors to do so. Nokia Siemens Networks bought the equipment side of the company in a deal completed in April 2011 — after many delays — for $975 million.
What’s left of the old giant — which, as Page said in a posting on the Google blog, “the world’s first portable cell phone nearly 30 years ago” — after the handset side is bought? Just Motorola Solutions, which specialises in government and public safety equipment.
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