Lenovo Smartphones to use ‘Moto’ branding for all of its future smartphones
Chinese PC giant Lenovo will no longer market phones under its own brand name. In an announcement made on Tuesday at the launch of Moto M in China, the company said that as part of larger restructuring at Lenovo, all the future smartphones developed by the company will now be branded as ‘Moto’ phones, according to a report by Campaign Asia.
In other words, this means that there will be no unique identity of Moto brand in itself. Now, all smartphones designed and manufactured by Lenovo will carry the ‘Moto’ brand. The news comes in light of the company’s no-so-good financial results.
The announcement also comes as part of a larger shift in leadership at Lenovo, which involves replacement of current Co-President and SVP of the company’s Mobile Business Group Xudong Chen with Gina Qiao, formerly SVP of Human Resources. Gina who previously worked in marketing and strategy in the company is expected to bring the required skill set to manage the mobile business.
Until now, Lenovo has struggled to make proper use of the Moto brand in its Q2 report. Lenovo has said that it has earned $2 billion by selling Moto and Lenovo branded phones, which is down 12 percent year-over-year.
The change at the helm of the smartphone arm is also meant to improve capacity in marketing within the mainland, explained Yang, who added that Lenovo’s overseas smartphone performance has been better than China’s.
The company has also made several senior hires from Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, and Microsoft, in the hope that the company will slowly transition from a hardware company into a “customer-oriented company focusing on devices with artificial intelligence and cloud services.”
Just a few days earlier, the company released its latest quarterly financial statement, saying that it had sold just over one million units of its recently launched Moto Z phones in its first three months.
“Our mobile business had good quarter-to-quarter volume growth (20%) and margin improvement,” Yang said, even if smartphone sales showed “only modest growth”. But PCs are still the core of Lenovo’s business, which makes up about 70% of the company’s revenue every year.
Lenovo has yet to make an official confirmation on the shift to Moto branding. So, keep watching this space for more updated information on the decision.
Source: India Today
