Lenovo launched its smartphone Moto M in China on Tuesday and the smartphone has already been listed on company’s website as well its China Store. Now the company has announced that as part of larger restructuring at Lenovo, all the future smartphones by the company will be named under its ‘Moto’ brand and not under its own name.
According to a report by Campaign Asia following Lenovo’s earnings results last week, the company has decided to use the Moto brand for all its smartphones. This effectively means that there will be no unique identity of Moto brand in itself. Earlier, the company was releasing Moto smartphones separately from Lenovo branded phones to keep a distinguishing factor between both brands. Now, as a result of this decision, all smartphones designed and manufactured by Lenovo will carry the ‘Moto’ brand.
The various series of smartphones under the ‘Moto’ brand such as X, E, and G might now be replaced by something like the recent smartphone ‘M’, to depict the merger of two brands into one.This decision by the company comes as a part of a macro-level restructuring at the company that involves replacement of current Co-President and SVP of the company’s Mobile Business Group Xudong Chen with Gina Qiao, formerly SVP of Human Resources.
The company has also made several senior hires from Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, and Microsoft, with the aim to transition from a hardware company into a “customer-oriented company focusing on devices with artificial intelligence and cloud services”.
The changes within the company, including the branding decision, have also been made to improve the performance of its smartphone business in Mainland China as per Lenovo’s Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing. The company’s performance overseas has been reportedly better than its performance in China.