Google is washing their hands of Motorola so to speak, as the decision to sell Motorola Mobility to Chinese company Lenovo is final at least between the two entities. Going forward, it sounds like Lenovo has big plans for Motorola, as does Motorola themselves, but what about Motorola’s efforts from 2013? How did Motorola fare? Unfortunately, Motorola hit nowhere near their target for earnings as they were hoping, which could have been due to a number of things, but overall they ended up with only $1.24 billion in revenue at the end of 2013,(Q4) which is down from the amount that they had the same time from the previous year. In 2012, Motorola reported revenue earnings of $1.51 billion in Q4, so in short they took a loss this year. How much of a loss? Total estimated losses amount to $384 million, which is no small number and ultimately might have something to do with Google’s selling off the company. Although, it’s also been said that talks between Google and Lenovo about this particular acquisition have been going on as early as 2011, which if true, means that Moto’s earnings(or lack there of) from the end of 2013 aren’t the only contributing factor.
Although the operations loss is something that Motorola and Google would have loved to avoid as any other large company would, not all in the land of Motorola Mobility has a bleak outlook. We still have the future of Motorola to look forward to, and it could end up an exciting one. The final amount of Motorola employees still at Google as of the last day of the year in 2013, was at 3,894. On the last day of September as stated in the Google Earnings report, Google had employed a slightly larger number of 4,259 people in Motorola, so that means that the Motorola division lost about 365 employees in just 3 months time. Perhaps not such a big number at a company the size of Google, but 365 employees is a lot to most of us who work for smaller establishments as opposed to bigger firms. That’s basically one person a day for an entire year. Hopefully, and according to the goals of Motorola and Lenovo, Motorola will have quite a different outcome moving forward.