Google just plunked down $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility. Would the deal have been cheaper if Big G had just purchased a handset maker back in January 2010 rather than launching the ill-fated Nexus One instead?
To figure that out, we need to look back at the state of Motorola some 19 months ago and apply some mathematical magic.
When the Nexus One was introduced, Motorola sported a market cap of about $10.6 billion. That’s for the entire Motorola beast, including the infrastructure and enterprise operations that later became Motorola Solutions. At the time, mobile devices represented 31 percent of Motorola’s sales and did not generate profits. The only fair division available is to split the company along revenue lines.
Full story: What Google lost—and gained—by not buying Motorola in 2010