After months of rumours of Google finally purchased a major part of HTC for a deal of $1.1 billion. The Taiwan company will send a large number of employees from its mobile division to Mountain View.
The rumour mill was in a feverish mood for the last few months as people speculated Google could purchase the ailing company.
How does this benefit HTC and Google?
HTC is currently reeling from successive quarter losses and dwindling sales. The new flagship device, the HTC U11 failed to reverse the downward spiral of revenue. The company was in dire need of help. Google is starting to go all in on the hardware side of things. This reached a peak with the release of the Pixel and the Pixel 2. The strategy all this while was to export the hardware manufacturing to other companies but this resulted in a mess. The routers were out sourced to Asus and TP-Link, the AR gear to Lenovo and the smartphones to LG and Huawei. The purchase of this company allows Google to gain more control over manufacturing. It also allows them to perfectly combine the software aspect with the hardware aspect to optimize the device to perfection.
Apple’s ARKit works so well in part because of Apple’s new A11 Bionic processor, and its dedicated GPU and neural-processing chips. If Google wants Google Assistant and ARCore to work seamlessly, it needs to make sure the underlying hardware can support them.
The tie-up’s not quite the acquisition that had been rumoured. It is rather a cooperation agreement. Google is hiring a team of employees from the Taiwan company—about 2,000 people in all. These are members of the “Powered by HTC” division. The majority of them have already been working on Google’s Pixel phones. The deal will be completed by the beginning of 2018.
