International Journal of Business Policy and Strategy Management Vol.1, (2015), pp.13-24 http://dx.doi.org/10.14257/ijbpsm.2015.1.02 ISSN: xxxx-xxxx IJBPSM Copyright ⓒ 2015 GVSchoolPub Google Bought and Sold Motorola Mobility: What it Means? N P Singh Professor (ITM) Management Development Institute Mehrauli Road, Sukhrali, Gurgaon-122007, India E-mail: knpsingh@mdi.ac.in, netra.singh@gmail.com Abstract The paper presents analysis of various deals done by Google in the context of Motorola mobility started with its acquisition in 2011/12 to selling it to Lenovo in 2014. Based on the analysis of secondary data, it is concluded that with the failed or not so successful attempt to manufacture smartphones specifically in USA, perhaps Google’s one of objective is achieved to get hold of large inventory of Motorola mobility patents at a minimum cost or possibly at no cost to protect unipolar world of Android operating system from the competition of Microsoft and Apple. Keywords: Patent, Motorola Mobility, Google, Android, Microsoft, Apple, Start-ups 1. Introduction Google bought Motorola mobility for $40 per share at 63% premium on Motorola Mobility's closing price on the New York Stock Exchange on the day of the deal (Halliday (2011). On 15 August 2011 Google announced it had bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in cash. In the process Google acquired more than 20,000 patents (17000 approved patents + 7000 in pipeline) of Motorola mobility and other segments of business such as set top boxes, manufacturing factories in different countries of Motorola Business (Nichols (2014)). Google had valued these patents worth US$ 5.5 billion according to Panzarino (2014). He had also mentioned that Google having Motorola’s patents is good news for all Android’s users and partners specifically those which are 100% dependent on Android. The deal is about making Google at par with Apple and Microsoft in terms of being software as well as hardware vendor and secondly to have good inventory of patents to protect Android and its user such as Samsung (Singh (2014)). Secondly, this deal will make Google to have a large inventory of patents again to complete with Apple and Microsoft in legal matters. Keeping in view the importance of the deal to ecosystem of mobile phones or smart mobile phones, the research paper presents few dimension of this deal such as possible reasons for Google to acquire Motorola mobility, reasons for Google to sell it to Lenovo within a short period, selling of all non-patents businesses of Motorola mobility in between, and earlier and recent bids of Google to acquire patents. It is worth to mention here that Google is a critique of patents, patent systems, and payment owners. Google believes patent rights are hindrance to innovations but need as many as patents at shortest possible times using many channels including creation of an online patent portal and payment of millions of dollars either weakening of patents or acquiring these patents as early as possible to beat regulatory changes if any in near future (Quinn and Brachmann (2015)). The paper end with a conclusion in the form of possible answers to seven research questions as given in the section of research methodology. These answers are based on data presented in the article.