Google provided no details about its plans for Motorola Mobility during its earnings call yesterday, leaving the industry without an indication of the Internet search giant’s strategy for the hardware space.
When the merger first became public, it sparked concern that Google would favor Motorola Mobility over other manufacturers of smartphones running its Android operating system, and left many questioning how a company focused largely on software would tackle the actual making of devices.
Google CFO Patrick Pichette said since the Motorola deal closed “only a few weeks” ago, it was not ready to make its plans public.
“Clearly, everybody should expect some changes at Motorola that we have already talked about in the public domain and when we said, Dennis and the management team is there resetting and retooling it. but we have nothing really to announce right now,” Pichette said, according to a transcript provided by SeekingAlpha.
The $12.5 billion acquisition was announced last August but only closed in May after both domestic and international trade regulators closed their reviews.
Google ousted former Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha last spring in favor of an executive from its own ranks, but has otherwise given little indication on its plans for the company, a silence that remained unchanged on Thursday.
Motorola Mobility’s smartphone sales contributed to Google’s top line, but its ongoing losses were a drag on Google’s results. Motorola lost $233 million during the second quarter on sales of $1.25 billion. Still, those losses looked pretty small compared to Google’s numbers. Its profits rose to about $2.8 billion on sales of $12.21 billion.
