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Lenovo will stick with ‘Moto’ for high-end devices, while budget phones carry its Vibe brand.
Lenovo plans to retire the Motorola brand, but it will stick with the Moto monicker for its high-end smartphones, it emerged this week.
The Chinese firm, which acquired Motorola’s mobile phones business from Google just over a year ago, will slowly phase out the Motorola brand, Motorola chief operating officer Rick Osterloh told CNET at CES in Las Vegas on Thursday.
The Moto brand will be applied to top-end phones, while budget devices will carry Lenovo’s Vibe brand, Osterloh explained. The Motorola name will also survive as a division of Lenovo, he said.
According to figures from Strategy Analytics, Lenovo-Motorola was the fourth largest smartphone maker in the world in the third quarter of last year with 18.8 million shipments giving it a 5.3% market share.
The firm came in just ahead of fellow Chinese vendor Xiaomi, which shipped 1 million fewer smartphones.
Lenovo, the largest PC maker in the world by unit sales, paid US$2.91 billion for Motorola in late October 2014. At the time, Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing talked up Motorola’s "iconic brand" and said he expected the company to be a strong growth engine for his company going forward.
