Google Sells Moto Home to Arris for $2.35B
That's $2.05 billion in cash and roughly $300 million in newly issued Arris stock, if you're keeping score at home. The shares give Google a 15.7 percent interest in Arris.
Arris also gets a license to those Motorola Mobility patents, which supposedly were the jewel of the Google/Motorola deal in the first place.
The deal is expected to close by April.
Why this matters
Sources were beginning to doubt Google would get the $2 billion price it wanted. But it worked out for the company, as Arris beat out Pace plc, which definitely submitted a bid, and possibly CommScope Inc. and Ericsson AB, which had been pegged as likely buyers.
The deal is going to be a challenge for Arris, which would double its head count to around 4,200. But the company catapults into a new level of business. Roughly 30 percent of its sales would be in set-top boxes after the deal, and Arris would become a stronger CMTS competitor to Cisco Systems Inc.
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— Craig Matsumoto, Managing Editor, Light Reading
So, Google got its asking price after all, and then some. First impression is that Arris, Pace and others must have wrangled it out. Nice situation for Google, if that's the case.