Today, Google did their Q4 2012 earnings call, and Google execs talked about a few other things during the call. Today they expanded on the current status of Motorola, along with the division’s financial and future integration between the companies. Senior VP and Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette responded to the question about the state of Motorola’s financials, by reiterating that when the company purchased Motorola it also inherited a 12 to 18-month product pipeline that isn’t easily changeable. Which is understandable. Phones and tablets don’t get made over night, they take time to create.
Pichette went on to explain that although many of the needed improvements have been put in place, Google is still only 6-months post-acquisition and these changes take quite a while to implement.
“It’s just the nature of the beast when you’re reinventing a business.”
Right now Motorola is losing money, the amount of money doesn’t matter to either company and it won’t be impacting their long term goals or profitability of Motorola. Like any other business decision, Google wants Motorola to be profitable.
“We do care about profitability, and that is our goal with every one of the areas where we invest,” Pichette said. “We’re not in the business of losing money with Motorola.”
But putting the financial issues aside, it is also understandable that it’ll take some time for Google to turn the company around and make it work the way Google is envisioning. Right now, the newly appointed CEO of Motorola, Dennis Woodside is hard at work trimming down the unnecessary parts of the business so it can operate on a core set of products. This was Google’s plan all along and we figure it will continue to be their plan for quite a while.
Although we are all excited to see what Google has planned to do with Motorola, and possibly a stock Android device from Motorola, these things do take time. I know it seems like forever since Google announced the acquisition, but even that took time to finish, nearly a year. So I’m sure we’ll see something from Google and Motorola in terms of devices, but probably not right away.