Lenovo × Motorola Acquisition

On 15 August 2011 Google announced it had bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in cash. With it Google acquired more than 20,000 mobile patents. Three years later, in 2014, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo in a deal valued at $2.91 billion, with $660M in cash. On paper, Google lost nearly $10 billion on the sale, but this calculation fails to note that Google retained $5.5bn worth of Motorola patents along with the companys RD lab. In 2013, Google acquired Waze for $1.3B through the entity Motorola Mobility Holding, but Waze was was not included in the sale of Motorola to Lenovo. Lenovo bought Motorola from Google with the goal of creating a premier global smartphone player and the deck claimed the acquisition made Lenovo the third biggest smartphone maker. Their plans did not pan out by 2017, Lenovo had fallen from 5 to 8 in the global smartphone market, taking just 3 market share.