Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) yesterday reintroduced the Motorola brand in China, unveiling the Moto X smartphone and four other devices to regain market share lost to Xiaomi Corp (小米).
The Moto X is retailing online for 3,299 yuan (US$527), while the Moto G phone will cost 1,299 yuan when it is released on Feb. 10, the company said at a press conference in Beijing.
Motorola also plans the Moto X Pro phone, Moto 360 smartwatch and Moto Hint wireless earbud headphones, Motorola president and chief operating officer Rick Osterloh said.
Lenovo, the world’s largest maker of personal computers, is expanding into mobile devices to fend off competition from Chinese rivals Xiaomi and Huawei Technologies Co (華為) at home and abroad.
The US$2.9 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility from Google Inc in October last year gave Lenovo an established global brand and a technology licensing agreement with Google to help boost sales.
“The market is so competitive that it’s hard to think about only one competitor,” Osterloh said in an interview. “If you focus on competitors, you’re going to go astray. The focus is squarely on consumers.”
Lenovo is re-establishing the Motorola brand in the biggest smartphone market after a two-year absence.
China also will be the first country in Asia to get the Moto Maker Service that lets users buy select custom materials for their phones, Osterloh said.
Xiaomi, established less than five years ago, more than tripled its share of smartphone shipments in China to a market-leading 16 percent in the three months ended September last year, from 5 percent a year earlier, researcher Canalys said in November last year.
While Lenovo maintained its 13 percent share, its ranking fell amid Xiaomi’s gains.
Globally, Xiaomi became the world’s third-largest smartphone vendor for the first time in the third quarter, with a share of 5.3 percent, IDC reported in October last year. Samsung Electronics Co and Apple Inc led the industry, while Lenovo was in fourth place with 5.2 percent, IDC said.
With the hype surrounding the Xiaomi brand, Xiaomi can “charge more and offer something better for a higher price,” Alberto Moel, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co, said before yesterday’s event.
“Lenovo is thinking that is a better, more sustainable model, and Motorola is an entry point into a strategy of better pricing,” he said.
Lenovo expects to replace Xiaomi in the No. 3 spot with the inclusion of Motorola and sell more than 100 million units, Mobile Business Group president and Motorola unit chairman Liu Jun (劉軍) said yesterday.
The company has begun to have some success using multiple brands, Liu said.
For example, in India, it already uses the Motorola brand online and Lenovo-branded devices for sales offline, he said in an interview in Las Vegas earlier this month. The company could pursue a similar strategy at home, he said.
Lenovo chief executive officer Yang Yuanqing (楊元慶) is betting the Motorola name and history can help Lenovo move up the value chain with Chinese consumers.
Yang fondly recalls his first mobile phone from the early 1990s: a Motorola DynaTac similar to the one used by the character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street.
“It was like a brick,” Yang said in a interview on Jan. 13. “Still, it was definitely the premier brand. It was very respected then.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day