Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside has confirmed that he’s leaving the company and heading to cloud storage provider Dropbox.
In an open letter posted on Motorola’s website, Woodside said he will step down at the end of March and move to a position as Chief Operating Officer at Dropbox.
Woodside will turn things over to Jonathan Rosenberg, a longtime Googler and SVP of Products from 2002 to 2011. Rosenberg will lead the transition as Motorola Mobiility changes hands from Google to Lenovo.
Woodside said Google Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora will remain Executive Chairman of the Motorola Operating Board, and continue to oversee the strategy.
Woodside oversaw Motorola’s transition to Google after the Internet giant bought the ailing handset vendor in 2012. Woodside was appointed to replace Sanjay Jha.
Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO, confirmed Woodside’s appointment as COO.
“We’ve long admired Dennis’s leadership at Google and Motorola where he ran multi-billion dollar businesses and built amazing organizations around the world,” Houston said in an email. “We’re so happy to welcome Dennis to our team — I can’t imagine a better person to help us bring Dropbox to global scale.”
The move comes after Lenovo late last month announced that it has agreed to acquire Mototola’s handset division for $2.91 billion, a fraction of the $12.4 billion Google paid for the business back in 2011.
The purchase will give Lenovo a smartphone offering in addition to the PCs and tablets it manufactures, making it one of the only other OEMs besides Apple that makes all three device types. It also gives Lenovo a solid entry point to the North American market.
Lenovo Thursday reported a 30 percent boost in profits during its latest fiscal quarter on strong growth in smartphone sales.