Google completes its billion dollar purchase of HTC's mobile division

Google earlier announced that it would be purchasing the embattled smartphone manufacturer, HTC, and has now closed the deal.

“I’m delighted that we’ve officially closed our deal with HTC, and are welcoming an incredibly talented team to work on even better and more innovative products in the years to come. ” Google’s Rick Osterloh welcomed the team, saying  in a blog post, “These new colleagues bring decades of experience achieving a series of “firsts”, particularly in the smartphone industry—including bringing to market the first 3G smartphone in 2005, the first touch-centric phone in 2007, and the first all-metal unibody phone in 2013. This is also the same team we’ve been working closely with on the development of the Pixel and Pixel 2.”

HTC has been a valued partner to Google in the past, developing the first Android phone, as well as building the first Pixel smartphone with Google.

The firm also dabbled with Windows phones, building the Windows Phone 8x by HTC as Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 flagship, and the HTC One M8 for Windows as the Windows Phone 8.1 Update flagship device.

It is expected that Google will use this purchase to bolster its “big bet on hardware”, and continue to build more devices like the Pixel, Pixel XL, and Pixelbook. It’s worth noting that the firm did purchase Motorola 6 years ago, said all the right things, and then unceremoniously offloaded the firm to Lenovo. For a cross-platform example, Microsoft and Nokia’s smartphone division met the same fate.

Whether Google will be able to make its HTC purchase pay off in the long term, is yet to be seen at this stage.