Google’s protracted acquisition of Motorola has finally been ratified and pushed through the courts in a deal worth around $12.5 billion.
The search engine giants coughed up $12.5bn in order to secure the mobile hardware firm, in a deal which was first made public back in in August 2011. But various stumbling blocks; including regulators in the US and Europe stalled the proposed deal. Watchdogs needed time to review the competition aspects of the merger.
The relevant governing bodies were concerned primarily with Google’s capture of the 17,000 or so patents granted to Motorola (over 7,000 are still pending) and whether or not Google would use these to unfairly influence the market.
The top brass on both sides of the Atlantic waved the deal through in February of this year after a fair amount of deliberation, which just left the other big player, China, to agree to the deal which they have now done.
The subsequent shift around in personnel has seen Motorola's current CEO Sanjay Jha dropped in favour of Google’s own Dennis Woodside; who Google chief Larry Page described as being "phenomenal at building teams". Page also credited Woodside with "delivering" on some of the world's largest ad broker's "biggest bets".
Google co-founder, Larry Page, said of the done deal "Motorola is a great American tech company that has driven the mobile revolution, with a track record of over 80 years of innovation, including the creation of the first cell phone. We all remember Motorola’s StarTAC, which at the time seemed tiny and showed the real potential of these devices. And as a company who made a big, early bet on Android, Motorola has become an incredibly valuable partner to Google."
As soon as the dust settles on this huge deal – the largest wireless-equipment deal in at least a decade, according to data collected by Bloomberg - Google hopes to become a competitor to the other handset manufacturers that make Android devices. In addition to Motorola Mobility phones, the software is used in handsets made by companies such as Samsung and HTC. Google will hope to start selling mobile phones to take on bitter rivals, Apple.