Motorola - First Made In US Moto X phone coming
Cellphone pioneer
Motorola announced Wednesday that it's opening a Texas manufacturing facility
that will create 2,000 jobs and produce its new flagship device, Moto X, the
first smartphone ever assembled in the US. The company has already begun hiring
for the Fort Worth plant. The site was most recently unoccupied but was once
used by fellow phone manufacturer Nokia, meaning it was designed to produce
mobile devices, said Will Moss, a spokesman for Motorola Mobility, which is
owned by Google.
The formal
announcement came at AllThingsD's D11 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes,
California, from Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside. Texas Governer Rick Perry's
office administers a pair of special state incentive funds meant to help
attract job-creating businesses to the state, but Moss said the Republican
governor did not distribute any money to close this deal. "Motorola
Mobility's decision to manufacture its new smartphone and create thousands of
new jobs in Texas is great news for our growing state," Perry said through
a spokeswoman. "Our strong, healthy economy, built on a foundation of low
taxes, smart regulation, fair legal system and a skilled workforce is
attracting companies from across the country and around the world that want to
be a part of the rising Texas success story." The factory will be owned
and run by Flextronics International Ltd., a Singapore-based contract
electronics manufacturer that has had a long relationship with Motorola.
Assembly accounts for
relatively little of the cost of a smartphone. The cost largely lies in the
chips, battery and display, most of which come from Asian factories. For
instance, research firm iSuppli estimates that the components of Samsung's
latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, cost $229, while the assembly costs $8.
In December, Apple said it would move manufacturing of one of its existing
lines of Mac computers to the US this year, reversing decades of increasing
outsourcing. The company has come under some criticism for working conditions
at the Chinese factories where its products are assembled. Some other
manufacturers, such as Hewlett-Packard, have kept some PC assembly operations
in the US. Moss said the Moto X will go on sale this summer. He said he could
provide few details, citing priority secrets. He said the idea from the
beginning was to bring manufacturing back to the US. "It's obviously our
major market so, for us, having manufacturing here gets us much closer to our
key customers and partners as well as our end users," he said. "It
makes for much leaner, more efficient operations." But Motorola will still
have global manufacturing operations, including at factories in China and
Brazil. "Fact remains that more than 130 million people in the US are
using smartphones," Mark Randall, Motorola's senior vice president of
supply chain and Operations, said in a statement, "but until Moto X, none
of those smartphones have been built in the USA."
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