If you haven’t heard by now, American icon Motorola has been sold to Lenovo by Google for $2.9 billion. Mountain View paid a lot of money when it initially acquired Motorola Mobility, but under its belt that company wasn’t able to generate any profit. It bled red all over Google’s balance sheets, which some presume is the reason why Google finally decided to cut the cord. Lenovo, a well established PC vendor that’s been wanting to play a greater role in the global smartphone market for quite some time, gets access to all the talent as well as the globally renowned brand name. That might not be enough to return it back to profitability, though Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing is confident that there’s enough potential to make it profitable once again.
Lenovo has been willing to break into the U.S. smartphone market for a long time, and this acquisition presents the perfect opportunity. Not only does Motorola have a well established relationship with carriers, it also has a vast global distribution network, Lenovo can leverage it to compete in the global smartphone market. Couple that with the popularity of Lenovo’s own smartphones back home in China as well as the entire region and we just might see the company emerge as a major player across both continents. Yuanqing has said that Lenovo will try to use the Motorola brand in China, just to test the waters, he also hinted that they might go with something like “Motorola by Lenovo,” if the need presents itself. Some divisions of Motorola have been retailed by Google, including the one behind the Ara modular smartphone.