China Conditionally Approves Google’s Acquisition Of Motorola Mobility

On 19 May 2012, the PRC Ministry of Commerce ("MOFCOM") approved the acquisition by Google Inc. of Motorola Mobility, Inc. under the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law ("AML"), but imposed conditions to require that Google continue to license the Android operating system and the patents acquired from Motorola in the same manner as Google currently does.

MOFCOM's decision once again demonstrates China's increasing influence on merger review of global transactions. Indeed, other regulators around the world, notably in the U.S. and the EU, approved the transaction without imposing any remedy. This is the third recent decision in the IT industry, after Western Digital/Hitachi and Seagate/Samsung (see our March 2012 Alert, Lessons from China's Merger Review Decisions Learned in Recent Hard Drive Acquisitions), in which MOFCOM came to a different conclusion than other antitrust authorities despite the global nature of the markets at issue.