An expensive mistake by Google could turn into a golden opportunity for China's Lenovo Group as it expands beyond its success in the personal computer industry.
Google is ridding itself of a financial headache by selling Motorola Mobility's smartphone business to Lenovo for £1.7 billion. The deal comes less than two years after Google bought Motorola Mobility for £7.5bn, in what was the biggest acquisition of the search giant's 15-year history.
While Google is backpedalling, Lenovo is gearing up for a major expansion. Already the world's largest maker of PCs, Lenovo is determined to become a big player in smartphones as more people rely on them instead of laptop and desktop computers to go online.
Lenovo is already among the smartphone leaders in its home country, but has been looking for ways to expand its presence in other markets, especially the US and Latin America. The company was rumoured to be among the prospective buyers for BlackBerry when that company was mulling a sale last year.
"We will be going from an emerging market player to a worldwide player in smartphones," Lenovo chief executive Yang Yuanqing said.
This marks Lenovo's second high-profile deal this month. It announced plans last week to buy a major piece of IBM's computer server business for £1.4bn.
Google is holding on to more than 20,000 mobile patents, providing it with legal protection for its widely used Android software for smartphones and tablet computers.
Google recovered some of the money it spent on Motorola by selling its set-top operations to Arris Group for £1.42bn last year.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article