Lenovo to Acquire Motorola Mobility ⇥ googleblog.blogspot.ca

Google announced that they were buying Motorola on August 15, 2011; the acquisition was confirmed on May 22, 2012, for a final total of $12.5 billion.

Larry Page, today, 617 days later:

We’ve just signed an agreement to sell Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion.

This acquisition cost Google $15.5 million for every day that they’ve owned Motorola. That doesn’t include the cost of rebranding, or the $500 million Google spent marketing the Moto X. (Mind you, it also doesn’t include Google’s sales of various other entities since they bought Motorola.)

Why would Google lose such an enormous lump of money?

Google will retain the vast majority of Motorola’s patents, which we will continue to use to defend the entire Android ecosystem.

Ah. Remember how some people argued that this wasn’t about patents?