Rebirth of England.

Chapter 805 Integration
On March 2011, 3, a magnitude 11 earthquake occurred in the eastern waters of Japan, which is the largest earthquake ever to occur in Japan.

The disaster triggered a massive tsunami that destroyed several cities on Japan's eastern coast and killed 15800 people.

More seriously, the earthquake caused reactor failures at two nuclear power plants in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, and one of the reactors at the first nuclear power plant had an abnormality after the earthquake, causing nuclear steam leakage...

Barron didn't particularly care whether many places were starting to stockpile iodized salt again...

At this time, he had returned to Grace Lavender Farm in Australia.

A week later, on March 3, NATO launched a large-scale air strike against Libya.

On the same day, another major news was announced in the IT industry.

Motorola Mobility's board of directors has voted to accept a takeover bid for the company from a consortium of banks including IC Capital and GII Funds.

This means that Motorola Mobility will be sold for US$105 billion, a price that is more than 45% premium compared to its stock price when it was suspended before the acquisition!

This acquisition has attracted much attention. In addition to Motorola Mobility's own reputation 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 Corporation is slightly ahead of Apple's iOS system and occupies the largest share of the smartphone market.

Many people believe that this acquisition, in which IC Capital purchased a large number of relevant patents owned by Motorola Mobility at a high price, will enable the Android system and related mobile phone manufacturers to get rid of the patent lawsuits currently faced by many giants including Apple, Microsoft, etc., thereby clearing the obstacles for their 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, 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 their partners to enrich their patent libraries. In addition, we will also increase our investment in Motorola, and consumers can look forward to the launch of more new Motorola mobile phone models..."

In fact, Motorola Mobility, which they acquired this time, still had about US$25 billion in funds on its books after the previous Motorola split, which means that the actual cost paid by IC Capital and GII Fund for this acquisition was about US$80 billion.

Motorola Mobility currently mainly consists of 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 has been able to make continuous profits.

Motorola Mobility is one of the world's two largest TV set-top box providers, and its main competitor is Cisco subsidiary Scientific-Atlanta. Their set-top boxes are mainly used by cable companies to provide services to families. But Baron knows that in the near future, the TV market will gradually transition to devices that deliver content over the Internet, such as Apple, Microsoft Xbox and Google will enter this field.

At the beginning, their plan was to sell Motorola Mobility's TV set-top box business after acquiring it. For example, in Baron's previous life, Google sold its set-top box business for more than US$20 billion after completing the acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

However, at that time, Google itself had plans for the Google TV business and was not very interested in the traditional cable TV set-top box business, which also conflicted with the direction of its own business. It would be better to split and sell Motorola Mobility's set-top box business while it was still profitable.

But it is different for Barron. Whether in the traditional TV station field or the entertainment content field, he has richer content than Google.

For example, he was able to integrate the 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 acquire and integrate PUMA Electronics (set-top box sales in the UK and manufacturing industry in China) previously owned by Digital UK. In addition to TV set-top boxes, it 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 its Motorola production base in Tianjin, China, and its R&D center in Yanjing, they will continue to be retained.

However, it will gradually reduce the size of more than one-third of its offices in other regions, its R&D centers in Chicago and Sunnyvale, and most of its manufacturing plants outside China. The purpose is to reduce some operating expenses while maintaining the corresponding R&D capabilities.

After all, Barron understands that in the era of smartphones, the "rules of the game" are completely different from before. Before this, many mobile phone brands might launch several or even dozens of mobile phone models a year, but Apple phones only have one or two fixed models a year, and they still beat other mobile phone manufacturers.

Other mobile phone manufacturers also often launch one or two models in each of the low, medium and high-end categories.

In the low-end mobile phone field, Motorola is destined to be unable to compete with Chinese domestic mobile phones in terms of cost. So what it should do most is to adopt Samsung's strategy and compete in the mid-to-high-end mobile phone market.

Therefore, after this, Motorola Mobility will focus on the development of Android phones and will only launch a small number of models each year. The primary goal is to turn its mobile phone business from loss to profit. As for increasing market share, it is also something that needs to be considered after it survives.

Motorola Mobility's mobile phone business will only retain the manufacturing plant in China in order to reduce costs. Other manufacturing plants will also be sold out one after another.

Even China's manufacturing factories will be under observation for the time being - Barron even considered adopting Apple's model, which is to no longer have its own mobile phone manufacturing factory, but only retain design and research and development, as well as the supply chain of components, and outsource the assembly of the entire machine to the OEM factory.

This model will even reduce the cost of mobile phone products, making profits higher, or in other words, giving them more room for price competition...

(End of this chapter)