Nearly half of Google's Moto gobble cash was spanked on patents
A cool $5.5bn to line Googorola's legal war chest
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Google has finally put a price tag of $5.5bn on the patents it snaffled in its $12.4bn purchase of Motorola Mobility.
The web behemoth declared the value of Moto's "patents and developed technology" in a filing with US stock market regulator SEC.
The Chocolate Factory's surprise Motorola Mobility gobble was attributed mainly to its desire to stock up on patents to protect its mobile operating system Android from the legal machinations of rivals Apple, Microsoft and even Oracle. But there has also been plenty of speculation about what the firm will do with a hardware arm.
Google has yet to make its plot for Moto clear, telling investors in its earnings conference call last week that it was too soon to reveal it plans. However, yesterday's filing to SEC attributed $2.6bn of the Moto cost to goodwill "primarily attributed to the synergies expected to arise after the acquisition".
The advertising giant will have to do something if it wants to bag more than some courtroom ammunition from Moto: the mobile wing's contribution to second quarter earnings was a $233m loss. That's not surprising given that Moto spent successive periods in the red before it was merged into the Googorola machine. ®
COMMENTS
Re: $5.5bn - but what are they actually worth?
I'm hoping they'll ultimately be found to be worth $0, along with all of Apple's patents. Then finally the industry can get on with making cool gadgets again rather than making ridiculous lawsuits.
Apple are trying to stick Samsung for 2.5bn for some patent "violations", so a whole suite of patents as defence and offensive weapons is probably worth it, and could easily repay itself over the patent lifetimes.
I'd rather it hadn't all come to this mind you. Bloody patent bollocks.
Google: "No, we didn't invest 12.5bn on a dud patent pocker chip that only has FRAND patents".
If Google wants to really put an end to this, they should purchase a company like LodSys or NTP that own "gold" patents, aka overly broad patents that were somehow not only granted but also verified from the supreme court. Then use those patents to bring the entire industry (except those that didn't stab them in the back pehaps like Barnes and Noble) to a standstill or demand huge royalties. This way, the motto that "everything that results in royalty payments is good" that is so popular in the circles of the US government will backfire badly, and they will be forced to drop software patents or only accept software patents that can be also be implemented in hardware without being too obvious, like any other country does.
But buying a company like Motorola Mobility that had all the good patents sucked by the parent Motorola company and left only with FRAND ones ain't going to work. Google bought Motorola Mobility thinking they were getting a killer deal, patents+devices, but as it turns out, they only got devices. So now they have to buy another company for the patents.
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