The American Electronics Manufacturer That's Owned By China

Plenty of companies, especially in the modern age of largely free flowing capital, trade hands. While some companies with storied pasts have grown up around a singular geographic location, other, more recent, success stories may instead involve services for an online community of users. Either way, companies that grow into great successes alongside their user base often find themselves transforming as time goes on. A great many brands go public, offering shares of their business to the world around them in an effort to become even more profitable, and sometimes even help founders cash out. Companies like Amazon started out small and then went public, exploding in value all at once after a steady incline in sales and brand power during the initial buildup of financial resources and customers. A good example of this is that if you invested $1,000 in Amazon at its 1997 IPO, you'd be looking at an investment valued at nearly $2.5 million today. However, while Amazon is still largely owned by Jeff Bezos, one brand in particular, however, saw its ownership change in a big way.

Motorola is a historic player in the telecommunications industry. The brand dates back to 1928, when brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin started making battery eliminators to convert radios to electric power in the household. The company's first customer was Sears, Roebuck and Co. (a company not without its own interesting financial history). Today, however, Motorola is owned by the Chinese technology titan Lenovo, but there's a very interesting chain of events that led to this acquisition.

Motorola took on the iconic name users recognize in 1947, and the classic, stylized "M" logo came about in 1955. The company's radio equipment helped Americans fight in WWII, and its cutting edge research was instrumental in pushing new radio technologies into the consumer sphere. In 1969, Motorola equipment traveled alongside Apollo astronauts to the Moon, and transmitted the first words from the lunar surface back to Earth. If that wasn't impressive enough, in 1984 Motorola began selling the first commercial cellular phone, the DynaTAC (a phone worth a nice chunk of change today). It was instrumental in internet connectivity equipment and pager technology before that.

However, in 2011 Motorola spun out its business into two separate entities. Motorola Solutions Inc. was established to provide products and services to governments and enterprise customers, and Motorola Mobility began operating as the company's consumer cellular and cable equipment manufacturer. Both brands were publicly traded until Google bought Motorola Mobility roughly a year later. Google sought to fold the expertise of Motorola's physical products into Google's software prowess. However, only a few years passed before another change would unfold. In 2014, after incorporating Motorola's patents and leveraging the brand's phone offerings to drive more users to the Android platform, Google sold the business to Lenovo, a brand headquartered in Beijing. The result is a corporate owner from China that produces devices with an American icon's subtle but powerful M logo emblazoned on the back.