A year after it opened to much fanfare, Google’s 445,780-square-foot Motorola Mobility smartphone manufacturing plant at Hillwood’s AllianceTexas development in North Fort Worth is being shuttered. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company will close the facility by the end of the year.
In an interview with the paper, Motorola president Rick Osterloh cited weak sales and high costs: “What we found was that the North American market was exceptionally tough.”
The WSJ reports that the factory currently employs about 700 people, down from its peak of 3,800 late last year.
Speculation of a potential closure began in February, when Google announced it was selling its Motorola handset business to Lenovo Group Ltd. for $2.9 billion, a deal that’s expected to close in late 2014.
Last year’s opening of the Motorola plant at Alliance was one of the biggest local news stories of 2013, as the Moto X was the first smartphone to be assembled in the United States. Hillwood’s chairman, Ross Perot Jr., joined Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at the project’s grand-opening event.
Motorola and its contract manufacturer, Flextronics, took occupancy of a former Nokia plant at Alliance that had sat empty since 2007. The corridor began seeing a brisk uptick in activity last year, prompting Hillwood to move forward with about 1.3 million square feet of speculative space, on top of a 1.2 million-square-foot build-to-suit for LG Electronics.
Executives at Hillwood were not immediately available to comment for this story.
