We all love to hear a CEO talking about the future of their company, and when it comes to Lenovo, our interest couldn’t be much higher right now. After having just purchased Motorola from Google for $2.91 Billion, the Chinese manufacturer means more to the Android landscape than they ever have done. It’s not as if they weren’t an important part of it before, it’s just that now, we’re more interested than ever. Lenovo are expanding all the time it seems these days, having just bought IBM’s server business, and now Motorola, it looks like things are very much on the up for the already successful industry giant. Recently, Lenovo’s CEO, Yuanqing Yang spoke at length with Motorola employees at their Chicago headquarters. After that, he sat down with Fortune for a lengthy interview, in which Yang had a lot to say about the tech industry at large.
Firstly, he detailed what he spoke to Motorola’s employees about, saying that Motorola and Lenovo are “very complementary to each other” and that going forward he wishes to “sell more than 100 million smartphones together in the year 2015”. It’s all very reassuring and there was even a little insight as to how Yang was first interested in the idea of purchasing Motorola, where he invited Eric Schmidt to dinner and simply told him “If you think you want run the hardware business, you can keep the business; but if you are not interested in the hardware business, we definitely can handle that, take over that.” Two months ago, Schmidt gave Yang a call, and as they say, the rest is history.
When asked about industry giants Samsung and Apple in the mobile arena, Yang simply said “Our mission is to surpass them”. They don’t exactly sound like fighting words to us, but it’s certain that Yang is confident he can make great use of Motorola. Speaking of which, he’s still unsure as to whether there will be any Lenovo-branded smartphones in the US, saying that “We will fully leverage the Motorola brand in the U.S. and Latin America, just like we leveraged the ThinkPad brand in the PC space. Motorola will be our smartphone product.” The company is thinking something along the lines of “Motorola by Lenovo” going forward and instead of simply focusing on one sector of the market – the mid-range, for instance – Yang wants to be producing great products throughout the range. Which could mean great news for Motorola fans in the next year or so.
The whole interview is worth a read, which you’ll find at the source link. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and over on Google+!