An employee answers phone calls at the switchboard of the Google office in Zurich August 18, 2009.
Google inked a deal Wednesday to sell Motorola to the Chinese tech conglomerate Lenovo for $2.91 billion.
Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola in 2011, largely in order to acquire the firm’s patent portfolio to fortify Google amid its ongoing patent wars with Apple and Microsoft. Under the deal announced Wednesday, Google will hold on to “the vast majority of Motorola’s patents,” according to a statement from Google CEO Larry Page.
The deal will need to be approved by regulators in both the U.S. and China before the sale can go into effect.