Alphabet acquired HTC (Pixel engineering team) for $1.1B, a transaction completed in January 2018, structured as cash — team transfer plus non-exclusive IP license.
HTC (Pixel engineering team) operates in Hardware / Pixel, is based in Taipei, Taiwan. Google entered an agreement with smartphone maker HTC under which a team of HTC engineers—many already working with Google on Pixel—joined Google, along with a non-exclusive license to HTC intellectual property. The deal deepened Google's investment in first-party hardware and its Pixel program. Google paid $1.1 billion in cash.
Expand in-house hardware engineering talent to advance the Pixel and devices business.
Advisory firms were not disclosed for this transaction.