TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan's HTC said on Thursday it will sell part of its unit for extended reality (XR) headsets and glasses to Google for $250 million and transfer some of its employees to the U.S. company.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, HTC said.

The two companies will also explore further collaboration opportunities, HTC added.

This is not the first sizable deal between the two companies. In 2017, Google announced its purchase of part of HTC's smartphone operations for $1.1 billion.

Google said in a separate statement that the latest deal would accelerate the development of the Android XR platform and strengthen the ecosystem for headsets and glasses.

Lu Chia-te, HTC vice president and general counsel, told reporters the company had granted its intellectual property rights to Google as a non-exclusive licence.

"Therefore, this is not a buyout nor an exclusive licence. In the future, HTC will still retain the ability to use, utilise, and even further develop it without any restrictions," he said.

(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Edmund Klamann)