The breakup of the former Motorola continues with news that Motorola Solutions plans to sell its enterprise unit to Zebra Technologies for $3.45 billion. Motorola Solutions separated from Motorola Mobility in 2011. Motorola Mobility, which included the company’s mobile device business and associated patents, was then bought by Google for $12.5 billion, and Google is now selling the device part of that unit to Lenovo for $2.91 billion.
Motorola Solutions divides its business into three market segments: enterprise, government, and public safety. The company has said that it wants to focus on government and public safety, so the sale of the enterprise unit is in line with that plan.
The sale to Zebra does not include Motorola Solutions’ iDEN unit, which is roughly a billion dollar business. The company’s iDEN network, which uses 800 MHz or 900 MHz spectrum, enables two-way radio communication and push-to-talk connectivity between user groups that are spread out over large geographic areas.
Zebra offers clients inventory tracking (Amazon is a customer) and is a provider of barcode and enterprise printing, machine-to-machine solutions, and motion and location sensing technology. Motorola Solutions is in the related business of selling bar code scanners, and is a larger company than Zebra. Zebra reported $1 billion in sales last year, and is more than tripling its projected revenue with the purchase of the Motorola Solutions unit. The deal will be largely debt-financed.
Together, the two companies expect to employ roughly 7,000 people, and to serve about 95% of the Fortune 500. The transaction is not subject to a financing condition and is expected to be completed by the end of 2014.
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