Lenovo are a Chinese company that mean business when it comes to smartphones. The business already have a footprint in the desktop and laptop markets and have been steadily increasing sales into the tablet and smartphone sectors. The company bought Motorola from Google and for 2015, showed strong growth. Lenovo is planning to use its two brands – Lenovo and Motorola – to appeal across the market, with Motorola considered the more premium brand of the two. And when it comes to various markets around the world, the company is clearly not frightened of a challenge. Earlier this week, Lenovo Senior Vice President, Aymar de Lencquesaing, explained that the company is aiming for strong sales growth in the India market, where it is aiming for the number two position.
According to Aymar, Lenovo has already captured almost one third of “4G” smartphones sold in India, which we are assuming means LTE-enabled devices. However, this share drops to 9% of the overall market (including Motorola) as India is still developing its LTE (and 3G) infrastructure, so not all customers are needing a LTE device. We’ve seen recent reports stating that Lenovo is one of the fastest growing vendors in India for the first quarter of 2016. Aymar excitedly explains that Lenovo has a strong foothold in most regions of the world, covering “Brazil, Latin America, EMEA, Middle East, and Africa.” It is the number two brand is Brazil and sales growth is increasing into Western Europe.
Why India? This is because India is seen as one of the fastest growing countries for smartphone adoption. Indian carriers are rapidly rolling out their networks to cover the country and smartphones are a more reliable connection to the Internet compared with fixed line alternatives, where quite often there is no coverage. The Indian Government’s “Make In India” project has encouraged smartphone businesses to manufacturer devices for the Indian population by building factories and employing Indians. Make In India has helped Lenovo manufacturer six million units a year, which it is selling via an online retail plan. However, Lenovo have plans to sell via offline means: in other words, they are planning to stock shops of smartphones to sell to customers. Lenovo understand the need to have almost their entire portfolio available offline, which means considerable investment into the necessary infrastructure to supply and support these sales.
For the premium end of handset sales, Lenovo is planning on using Motorola’s branding as already said. However, this will require ongoing investment into bringing groundbreaking products to the market, such as the Moto Mods featured on the Moto Z family. It will also include their development work with the Tango smartphone, developed in conjunction with Google. Lenovo’s research and development businesses have been reorganized and incorporated under the Motorola umbrella.