Google and HTC Corp. announced a $1.1 billion cooperation agreement Wednesday night, as the US tech giant moved to bolster its hardware offerings. Google is hiring a team of HTC employees-the company wouldn’t comment on how many exactly-most of whom have already been working on Google’s Pixel phones.
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google is set to buy part of struggling Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp., according to people familiar with the situation, part of the search giant’s latest effort to crack the handset market.
“The deal also includes a non-exclusive license for HTC intellectual property”, Google announced. In 2010, HTC and Google created the Nexus One, the very first Nexus smartphone.
As for HTC, it looks to use the $1.1 billion to stay afloat in the smartphone and VR markets, so the company is not in the clear just yet.
It would be a good news for HTC, but also for fans of smartphones Pixel.
“It’s still early days for Google’s hardware business”, Rick Osterloh, Google’s senior vice president of hardware wrote in a blog post.
The company has been rumored to be negotiating a takeover with Google, and this announcement may be a sign that such a buyout is happening. The line replaced the Nexus series and has introduced more Google-powered devices such as the Pixel phones, Google Wifi, Google Home, Chromecast Ultra, and Daydream View.
As the negotiations were said to be close to being finished, one would expect some additional information around this time, right? In return, Google will fork over $1.1 billion to the cash starved HTC, which has reported a loss for nine consecutive quarters.
Google completed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2012. Samsung is the world’s top smartphone maker, with a 23 percent share, with Apple in second place with nearly 15 percent, according to IDC.
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The company will launch its second generation of Made by Google products early next month. It famously purchased Motorola in 2011 for $12.5 billion and then sold it for $2.91 billion to Lenovo in 2014. However, HTC as a whole won’t be joining Google. Having different Android partners making their own phones with disparate components makes this task more hard for Google – especially when Apple can pick one set of AR hardware to marry to its software.
