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 U.S.
The new phone will be manufactured near Fort Worth, Texas, creating about 2,000 jobs, Motorola Mobility Chief Executive Officer Dennis Woodside said in an interview at the D: All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
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.
Flextronics International Ltd. will make the device, said Renee Brotherton, a spokeswoman for the company.
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.
Google is using new designs and products to make the most of last year’s $12.4 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings, its largest acquisition ever. It’s also racing to regain share lost to Apple in the $293.9 billion market for smartphones.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for us out there over the next couple of years,” Woodside said. “We’re trying to bring Motorola back to its roots.”
The Moto X, which will use two processors to conserve battery life, will include sensors to help it better understand what a user needs, Woodside said. For example, the phone will know when it’s turned on or being used in a vehicle.
By pledging to make smartphones in Texas, Google follows Lenovo and Apple, which last year said they would shift some PC manufacturing to the U.S.
Lenovo is adding more than 100 jobs at its facility in the Triad near Greensboro, N.C.
Apple’s plan will result the creation of about 200 jobs, if the company follows the pattern of other technology companies, labor economists said at the time.
Motorola, which uses Google’s Android operating system, ranked No. 4 among smartphone makers in the U.S. in March, with 8.5 percent market share, down from 9.1 percent in December, according to ComScore Inc.
Apple was No. 1, adding almost three percentage points to 39 percent from December, while Samsung Electronics Co., which also uses Android software, had 22 percent share. HTC Corp. had 9 percent.
Google’s Motorola Mobility also is looking at new ways wearable-computing devices could confirm a smartphone user’s identity, according to Regina Dugan, senior vice president of advanced technology and projects at Motorola Mobility.
For example, Motorola is working with a company that designs electronic tattoos that could be used for authentication, said Dugan, who also appeared at the conference yesterday. Motorola is reviewing a pill with a chip inside that could be used for authentication.
