HTC is partly incorporated by Google

Google puts $ 1.1 billion on the table for some of HTC smartphone builders. For that amount, Google gets a non-exclusive intellectual property license and takes over 2000 employees, mostly engineers already working on the Pixel phone.

With the deal, Google puts a step towards hardware development of smartphones. At the moment, the company is spending it, including HTC. For example, HTC should build the Nexus 9 tablet and it is also responsible for the production of Pixel smartphones sold under the Google brand. Among other things, the engineers and product designers who work on the Pixel phone will now definitely move to Google. A total of around 2,000 employees are about half of the 4000 employees who employ HTC for the development of smartphones.


High Tech Computer, abbreviated HTC, was founded in 1997. It released the first Android phone in 2008. In those years, the company became one of the major smartphone manufacturers in the world, but after that it began to decay. Market share fell from over 10 percent to no more than 2 percent and the value of the company became four times as small as a few years.

Due to the problems that last month, HTC expressed concern about a takeover or split-off of, for example, the virtual reality branch. After that, the rumor began to run at full turn and Google was named as the main candidate buyer.

Partial takeover

Now it turns out that Google does not completely shut up the smartphone builder, but 1.1 billion pays for a partial takeover. With this, HTC is getting a new financial breathing space. The company has announced another successor for the U11. The vive technology for virtual reality remains with HTC.

In the summer of 2011, Google already took a similar acquisition: it bought Motorola Mobility for 12.5 billion, to turn it back to Lenovo’s “$ 2.91 billion” three years later. However, Google retained the patents. This deal also gives access to HTC’s patents, even though it is non-exclusive.

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