Chapter 805 Integration
On March 11, 2011, a major earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale occurred in the eastern sea of Japan. This is also the largest earthquake that has ever occurred in Japan.
This disaster triggered a massive tsunami, which destroyed many cities on the eastern coast of Japan and killed 15,800 people.
What’s more serious is that the earthquake caused the failure of two nuclear power plant reactors in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture. Among them, one of the reactors at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant experienced an abnormality after the earthquake, causing a leak of nuclear steam...
Barron did not I am particularly concerned about whether many places have begun to stock up on iodized salt again...
By this time, he had returned to Grace Lavender Manor in Australia.
A week later, on March 19, NATO began a large-scale air strike against Libya.
On the same day, another blockbuster news was announced in the IT industry.
Motorola Mobility's board of directors completed a vote and they accepted the acquisition offer for the company from a syndicate composed of IC Capital and GII Funds.
This means that Motorola Mobility will be sold for US$10.5 billion. This price is a premium of more than 45% compared to its stock price that was suspended before the acquisition!
This acquisition has attracted much attention. In addition to Motorola Mobility's popularity in the mobile phone industry, one of the acquirers, IC Capital, is also a wholly-owned shareholder of Android.
The Android system developed by Android is slightly ahead of Apple's iOS system and occupies the largest share of the smartphone market.
Many people believe that this acquisition, the large number of related patents owned by Motorola Mobility purchased by IC Capital at a high price, will enable the Android system and related mobile phone manufacturers to get rid of the current problems suffered by Apple, Microsoft, etc. The giant’s patent litigation will clear the way for its future development.
On the day the news was released, Ivanta TP, chairman of IC Capital, who led the acquisition, said that after the acquisition is completed, they will integrate Motorola Mobility’s existing business and ensure that Motorola’s A brand with a glorious history continues to maintain its position in the mobile phone industry.
“We have no intention of merging Motorola Mobility into Android. As a mobile operating system development company, Android will continue to provide an open platform for all mobile phone manufacturers...”
In the TV camera, Ivanta said with a smile:
“Of course, the relevant patents owned by Motorola Mobility will also help Android companies and partner manufacturers enrich their patent library. In addition, we will also increase our support for Motorola Mobility. With investment, consumers can look forward to more new Motorola models The launch of the mobile phone..."
In fact, the Motorola Mobility they acquired this time still has approximately US$2.5 billion in funds on its books after the previous Motorola spin-off. In other words, IC Capital and The actual cost paid by GII Fund for this acquisition was approximately US$8 billion.
The current Motorola Mobility mainly includes two businesses: mobile phones and TV set-top boxes. The mobile phone business has been losing money in recent years, but the set-top box business can continue to make profits.
Motorola Mobility is one of the two largest TV set-top box providers in the world. Its main competitor is Cisco subsidiary Scientific-Atlanta. Their set-top boxes are mainly used by cable TV companies to provide services to households. But Barron knows that in the near future, the TV market will gradually transition to devices that deliver content over the Internet, and companies such as Apple, Microsoft Xbox and Google will all enter this field.
At the beginning, their plan was to sell their TV set-top box business after acquiring Motorola Mobility - for example, in Barron's previous life, Google completed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. , sold its set-top box business for more than $2 billion.
However, at that time, it was because Google itself had plans related to Google TV business, and it did not have much interest in the traditional cable TV set-top box business, and it conflicted with the direction of its own business, so it was better to take advantage of it. Motorola Mobility's set-top box business will be spun off and sold when it is still profitable.
But Barron is different here. Whether it is in the field of traditional TV stations or entertainment content, he has richer content than Google.
For example, he can cooperate with SEM Group, Sinclair Group, Marvel-MGM Group, Netflix, DailyVedio and other businesses with the set-top box business.
Therefore, after completing the acquisition of Motorola Mobility, the set-top box business will be acquired and integrated with PUMA Electronics (set-top box sales in England and manufacturing industry in China) previously owned by Digital UK, and in addition to TV set-top boxes , will also carry out research and development of network set-top boxes, and cooperate with O2 Telecom in North America and Europe to build home broadband networks, so as to enter this more emerging and promising market.
As for Motorola Mobility's mobile phone business, including their Motorola production base in Jinmen, China, and their R&D center in Yanjing, they will continue to be retained.
But it will gradually reduce more than one-third of its offices in other regions, as well as its R&D centers in Chicago and Sunnyvale, and most of its manufacturing plants outside China, in order to preserve the corresponding In addition to improving our R&D capabilities, we will also reduce some of our operating expenses.
After all, Barron understands that the future era of smartphones will be completely different from the previous "game play". Before this, many mobile phone brands might be able to launch several or even a dozen mobile phone models a year. , but like Apple mobile phones, only one or two models are fixed every year, which still lags behind other mobile phone manufacturers.
Other mobile phone manufacturers often launch one or two models in each of low, medium and high grades.
In the field of low-end mobile phones, Motorola is destined to be unable to compete with China's domestic mobile phones on cost, so what it should do most is to compete in mid-to-high-end mobile phones like Samsung's strategy.
So after this, Motorola Mobility will focus on the development of Android mobile phones, and will only launch a small number of models every year. The primary purpose is to complete the turnaround of its mobile phone business. As for the market The increase in share is something that needs to be considered only after surviving.
Motorola Mobility's mobile phone business will only retain its manufacturing plants in China, also to reduce costs. Other manufacturing plants will also be sold to external parties one after another.
Even China's manufacturing plants will be temporarily observed - Barron has even considered adopting Apple's model, which is to no longer have its own mobile phone manufacturing plants, but only retain design, research and development, and elements. In the device supply chain, the assembly of the complete machine is handed over to the OEM factory.
This model will even reduce the cost of mobile phone products, making profits higher, or in other words, having greater room for price reduction competition...
(End of this chapter)