Thursday, January 30, 2014

Motorola may not have hurt Google's bottom line quite as badly as it seems

After selling different business units and holding onto an array of patents, Google made a seemingly-sound business decision

Google selling off Motorola to Lenovo this afternoon came about as far out of left field as anyone could have imagined. On top of what this potentially means for the future of Motorola's products as well as Google's aspirations in the hardware business — two things we are far from understanding at this point — there's an interesting financial side to this deal.

Motorola was purchased by Google at the end of 2011 (with the deal closing in the Spring of 2012) for a pretty hefty $12.5 billion. That's a large delta from the $2.91 billion that eventually changed hands between Google and Lenovo today, but those two numbers don't quite tell the entire story.

Considering Motorola's handset portfolio and sales leading up to the point when it was sold to Google, the assumption was that a big chunk of that $12.5 billion was for the company's patent portfolio. Indeed, Google valued Motorola's vast array of patents at a sizeable $5.5 billion shortly thereafter. It makes sense then that Google chose to hold onto these patents when it eventually sold every other part of Motorola to Lenovo.

So $2.91 billion from Lenovo, plus $5.5 billion worth (to Google) of patents. That's $8.41 billion of value, which comes up short of the $12.5 billion it paid initially. But in the end, Google didn't finish the deal $4.09 billion in the hole — there's far more to this balance sheet.