Google once acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5B but it was soon sold off to Lenovo back in January 2014. The merger formally happened before the year ended and then we started referring to Motorola as a Lenovo-owned company. The mobile industry seemed to have accepted that fact but (surprise! surprise!), Lenovo Mobile is now believed to be incorporated into Motorola.
Usually, the company who is paying will retain the name but Lenovo must be thinking that the Motorola brand is more popular. Lenovo Mobile is said to be one with Motorola soon. It’s more of a re-organization within the company and Lenovo Mobile Group President Chen Xudong himself said that a “new organizational structure will be immediately released”. The changes will also include ZUK, the Lenovo-backed company, which we learned is actually Motorola’s dual-brand strategy.
Lenovo’s numbers are not good the past year or so. During the first quarter of 2015, the mobile business division saw a pre-tax loss of $292 million and a profit margin of -13.8%. Shipments were down to 4.7% (0.5 percent decrease) in the worldwide market share. All these bad news are probably the reasons why Lenovo Mobile will instead be merged into Motorola.
The Motorola team has been recently added to the research and development aspects of Lenovo and looks like they will be leading most of the mobile division now since Mr. Xudong said they want products lines to be incorporated into Motorola–not Motorola into Lenovo Mobile. Let’s just wait for a formal and official announcement from either of two companies.
VIA: Jieman, Xiaomi Today
