Lenovo Mobile is restructuring its mobile business in China and despite the company’s previous claims that the Lenovo brand will never be scrapped in favor of Moto, the company recently announced that it will soon move its online domain in China to Moto.com. Starting tomorrow, Lenovomobile.com will be no more, and its visitors will instead be redirected to Moto.com.
Motorola Mobility was acquired by Lenovo from Google in October 2014. In August 2015, Lenovo’s smartphone business was merged with Motorola Mobility and this strategic move refocused the Chinese tech giant’s resources to support two main smartphone brands – “Moto” and Lenovo’s own “Vibe.” However, in November 2016 Lenovo announced that it will abandon the Vibe brand and as such all future Lenovo devices will instead carry the Motorola logo. Meanwhile, all Moto devices were backed by the “Moto by Lenovo” branding, though that changed in March 2017 when Motorola Mobility’s CMO announced that the company will move away from the “Moto by Lenovo” brand in order to focus on Motorola’s legacy instead. Now, in what appears to be a decision to fully embrace Moto devices, Lenovo is abandoning its original online domain in China in favor of Moto.com.
This decision was not entirely unexpected despite Lenovo’s previous claims, especially when considering the fact that Lenovo hasn’t announced any new smartphones this year. On the other hand, the Moto branch continues to develop and release new devices at a fairly regular pace. In the first half of 2017 alone, Moto announced a generous number of handsets including the Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus, the Moto C and C Plus, the Moto Z2 Play, as well as the more recent Moto E4 along with its larger counterpart. Earlier this year, Lenovo’s subsidiary ZUK Mobile was also rumored to be shut down and merged with Lenovo’s Moto. This hasn’t yet come to pass so it remains to be seen if Lenovo has any such plans for ZUK Mobile, or if the company will allow its subsidiary to coexist alongside the Moto brand moving forward. An update on the company’s hardware endeavors will likely follow in the coming months.