After the flop with Motorola, Google tries again. To become a protagonist in the production of smartphones, the Mountain View giant has bought a division of HTC at a price of 1,1 billion dollars. In particular, the Taiwanese company transfers a part of its employees and intellectual property to Big G through a non-exclusive license agreement. Google confirmed the deal with a post on your blog. The negotiation is closed, but will be formalized within the first few months of 2018, after the usual regulatory approvals. Today, HTC's stock is suspended on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Google and HTC have a ten-year relationship. The Taiwanese company has produced the Pixel 2, a Google smartphone that will be presented on October 4th. The operation announced today would concern the team that worked on Pixel, with Mountain View preferring to pay more in order to acquire the tools to produce a fully Google-branded smartphone.
"As pioneers of the smartphone market, we are very proud of our history of innovation and support Google in boosting the Android market," said Cher Wang, president and CEO of HTC. "This deal is a brilliant step forward." in our long history of partnership and will enable Google to enhance its hardware business, while ensuring the continuity of collaboration on innovation within our HTC smartphones and Vive virtual reality. In fact, the Taiwanese company will continue to produce smartphones and will focus heavily on the HTC Vive augmented reality viewer.
Rick Osterloh, Google's senior vp hardware, explained that with this agreement “a team of HTC talent will join Google as part of the hardware organization. These future fellow Googlers are incredible people we've worked closely with before on the Pixel line of smartphones, and we're excited to see what we can do together as one team. In many ways, this agreement is a testament to the decades-long history of teamwork between HTC and Google."
In August 2011, Google had already tried to jump into telephony by buying Motorola for 13,2 billion dollars. But something went wrong and Motorola was sold to the Chinese company Lenovo just three years later, for just $2,9 billion.
