Is Google Planning to BREAK UP Motorola?

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is looking to sell off Motorola Mobility’s set-top boxes and related equipment manufacturing unit and is enlisting the help of Barclays (NYSE:BCS) to find buyers. The search company  is hoping to get about $2 billion for the unit, according to Bloomberg.

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Google, which is hoping to turn Motorola’s focus toward only smartphones, also recently announced plans to cut 4,000 jobs and close about a third of the latter’s 90 facilities. Google bought Motorola Mobility in May for $12.5 billion with hopes of using the manufacturing company to compete better with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) in the mobile market. Motorola’s handsets already use Google’s Android software. The acquisition also gave Google ownership of more than 17,000 Motorola patents, a leverage it needed after losing out on an auction of the patents of Nortel Networks to a group that included Apple, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM).

In its first earnings report since the acquisition, Google posted a second-quarter revenue of $12.21 billion in July, a 35 percent increase from the $9.03 billion in the second quarter of 2011.

Motorola earlier tried to sell its Home Business unit in 2009 for more than $4 billion.

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