Motorola Broadband & Mobility Solutions is a subsidiary of Motorola, which was split in 2008 to form it and Motorola Mobile Devices. At that time it was an interesting move to make since the public generally thought that Motorola is slowly but steadily moving away from mobile devices, which wasn’t truth at all. Greg Brown, CEO and chairman of Motorola Solutions made it quite clear that this is a matter of Motorola’s expansion and that there will be no priority shifts of any kind. Mr. Brown is the longest serving CEO of Motorola to this day, holding that role from 2008. He joined Motorola Solutions in 2004.

Greg Brown, Motorola CEO and chairman

The split, however, didn’t go as smoothly as expected, mostly due to internal issues as well as the 2009 economic crisis. In 2010 Motorola officially announced the split into two independent companies.

In 2011 Google made attempts to acquire Motorola Mobility for a hefty sum of US$12.5 billion, which was a deal requiring approval from US and European regulators. Google has had its cross-hair on this acquisition as it was looking into improving their patent portfolio which would make it easier for them to protect and develop any Android features.

Motorola Mobility was looking into preserving their patents as it would be somewhat difficult for the company to survive with a shared portion of the portfolio. It was agreed for Google to do due dilligence on Motorola’s patent list in the meantime.

Later that year, in November of 2013, Motorola Mobility was merged with Google.

Next year, in January, Lenovo was to take over Motorola Mobility business from Google, for a price of $US3 billion. While this went through, Google still kept ownership of the Motorola Mobility patents. Lenovo acquired proper licensing to use these patents and other Motorola IP. By the end of 2014, Lenovo completed the acquisition of Motorola Mobility.


Editor’s note: This is an informative historical article, for any troubleshooting for your Motorola product kindly refer to your model’s Motorola user manual or check out our Motorola modem troubleshooting category.