RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif., May 30 (UPI) -- Motorola says its Moto X smartphone, to be built at a factory in Texas, will be the first such device manufactured in the United States.
The majority of smartphones are manufactured in Asia but the Moto X -- designed under the ownership of Google, which bought Motorola Mobility last year -- will be assembled at a 500,000-square-foot plant employing about 2,000 people near Fort Worth, Texas, CNN reported Thursday.
Dennis Woodside, chief executive officer of Motorola Mobility, said 70 percent of the phone would be assembled at the Texas facility that once manufactured Nokia phones, although some of its components would be built overseas.
Manufacturing its phone in the United States would give Motorola a competitive advantage as opposed to sourcing it from Asia, he said.
"When your manufacturing is thousands of miles away from your engineers and your designers, you lose the ability to innovate, you lose the ability to make fast changes to how you're manufacturing things," Woodside said.
In making the announcement Wednesday at the D11 tech conference in California, hosted by tech news site AllThingsD, Woodside hinted the Moto X would go on sale this fall and be priced below competing phones such as Apple's IPhone 5 and Samsung's Galaxy S4.
Several U.S. carriers will offer the Moto X, he said.
