Lenovo’s CEO Yang Yuanquing has been rather quiet about how they will market Motorola after the sale to Lenovo is completed sometime by the end of this year. According to the latest information by our source, it seems as though Lenovo will market themselves as a company that will take a “dual brand” approach in both smartphones and tablets – Lenovo already sells great smartphones and tablets under their own moniker and it sounds as though they will carry both names for a while. While Motorola makes terrific smartphones, they have not been in the tablet business since their 2011 Droid Xyboard and Xoom 2 – they abandoned the tablet world and never looked back.
CEO Yang Yuanqing’s Lenovo is very familiar with the marketability of brand names – they acquired the rights to make and use the IBM ThinkPad name from IBM and for the next five years continued to sell Lenovo’s product under the IBM ThinkPad name. I doubt that any user even noticed the difference – Lenovo made it as close to the original as possible (still do to this day) and even hired IBM engineers to help them make it right. Today it is still called a ThinkPad, but has Lenovo’s name of it – talk about a smooth transition – and it looks like they will treat the Motorola brand with the same reverence.
CEO Yang Yuanqing also commented that to a large extent, past sales of branded devices rely heavily on relationships with existing carriers, especially in mature markets such as Europe and the U.S. By using the Motorola name and their good relationships, it will make it easier for Lenovo to ‘get their foot in the door’ so to speak. This goodwill most certainly would allow Lenovo’s good name/company to become more familiar to the existing carriers. Lenovo sees HTC getting back in the tablet game with the new Nexus 9 and thinks that the time is right for Motorola to do the same thing – whether Lenovo will tackle just the Android market or the Window market as well, remains to be seen.
Please hook up with us on our Google+ Page and let us know if you would like to see Motorola start making tablets once again…even if it is under the reins of Lenovo…as always, we would love to hear from you.