Lenovo to kill Motorola phone branding

Motorola has come a long way from building the first cellphone, losing market share globally, having its mobile business bought by Google for $12.5bn (mainly for its patents) which later sold off that business to Lenovo for $2.9bn in 2014, and now we may never see the Motorola name on any new phones that Lenovo will produce.

Reports say that Lenovo wants to do away with the Motorola name and branding on its devices but will maintain the ‘Motorola Mobility’ name for its phone business. It will brand the phones ‘Moto’ for its high-end devices and ‘Vibe’ for its low-budget phones, according to the Times of India. We might also be seeing a blue Lenovo logo alongside the winged ‘M’ typically found on many Motorola phones.

Motorola failed to keep up with all the competition and latest smartphones coming from other major phone makers and started making losses on devices. It later sold its phone business to Google to hopefully resuscitate it, but Google realised they were not going to be as big as they had hoped and decided it was time to cut their losses. Lenovo offered to buy the mobile business, which we think was a move to enter the Western smartphone market and as they had previously been big in mostly Asia. Lenovo might only have been popular for it PCs and laptops in the US rather than for its phones.

This is similar to what Microsoft has done with Nokia after buying its mobile phone business, branding their latest devices ‘Lumia’.

Will it be a major competitor in 2016? We don’t think so because as well structured as Lenovo is we don’t expect to see anything exciting from them this year from them as they rebrand. We shall have to wait for what they come up with for the Android world maybe next year.