Monday, January 30, 2012

Will Google have to start a patent war to get $9bn of value from Motorola? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

From a GOOG/MMI reality check

The really profitable bit of the business is the "Home" division, which makes set-top boxes, but has been bumping along at around $900m revenues for the past year. It actually makes money - only around $60m per quarter, but at least it's profit, compared to the consistent losses in the mobile business, which has only made a profit in two of the past nine quarters. Even so, it would take 75 years for the Home business's profit to make back the money Google paid for the business.

In other words, in purely financial terms, MMI is a dog.

Faced with all that, it looks increasingly likely that Google will instead use Motorola's patents aggressively - as Müller suggests in the provocatively-titled Will Google break or save the internet?

Will Google have to start a patent war to get $9bn of value from Motorola? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

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