Tech giant acquires HTC mobile division team for $1.1 billion

abiola

September 21, 2017 10:35 AM

Google hopes to strengthen its hardware division with this buy even as it plans to roll out the Pixel 2 device.

Google has bought the mobile division team of Taiwan smartphone maker HTC for a whopping $1.1 billion.

The announcement was expected when it was learnt on Wednesday September 20, 2017.that HTC briefly stopped the trading of their shares on the stock exchange market.

“These future fellow Googlers are amazing folks we’ve already been working with closely on the Pixel smartphone line, and we're excited to see what we can do together as one team,” Rick Osterloh, Google’s hardware boss, wrote in a blog post. “The deal also includes a non-exclusive license for HTC intellectual property.”

Peter Shen, HTC’s chief financial officer, said that HTC would still employ more than 2,000 research and design staffers after the deal is done, down from around 4,000, according to theNew York Times. That makes today’s announcement more of an acquisition of talents than a traditional acquisition of resources.

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This makes it the second time Google will buy into a smartphone company. The first was with the acquisition of Motorola for $12.9billion, which it eventually sold off in 2014 to Lenovo for $2.9billion.

This move is seen as a strategy to challenge the iPhone in the hardware market as Google has begun making its own devices called Pixel phones.

HTC is said to be selling because it has been struggling with its smartphone sales and virtual-reality-headset business.

The two companies (HTC and Google) have had a good working relationship with HTC having recently manufactured the Google Pixel and Pixel XL.

Prior to this, HTC released its first Android powered phone in 2008, and also helped launch the Google Nexus line of products with the Nexus One released in 2010.

Google’s next hardware products, set to include the HTC-made Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL (manufactured by LG), Google Home Mini, and Pixelbook will be unveiled at an October 4, 2017 event in San Francisco.

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