Word coming out of The Wall Street Journal today is that Motorola is shutting down their MotoMaker plant in Texas, which was staffed by Flextronics. You may recall that earlier this year, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. Now the sale isn’t final yet, but we are already beginning to see Lenovo’s influence on Motorola taking place. Motorola’s big marketing push for the Moto X last year was the fact it was assembled in the US. Which was a big deal to those of us here in the US because it’s bringing jobs over here instead of sending them over to China, where basically everything is made.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Motorola is shutting down their factory, and now The Verge is also reporting the same thing. So that means it’s pretty much confirmed. However, we can’t say we are surprised since Motorola’s Moto X didn’t really sell exceptionally well. Sure it probably sold well than their previous devices that were exclusives, but having it in the US only for such a long time really killed its momentum. “What we found was that the North American market was exceptionally tough,” Motorola President Rick Osterloh stated in an interview with the WSJ.
While we aren’t surprised by this news, we are saddened. However, we are hoping that Motorola sticks around when the Lenovo deal does go through because they make some great devices, and were one of the first phone manufacturers ever. They’ve literally been around for nearly 100 years, which is nothing to sneeze at. But everyone goes through rough times, and Motorola’s doesn’t seem to be getting bright anytime soon. However, Lenovo says they can turn around Motorola in a quarter or two. So we’ll keep an eye on what Lenovo does with them. How many of you are shocked that Motorola is closing their MotoMaker plant?