Lenovo eliminates Motorola brand

Lenovo's Chinese electronics maker plans to phase out Motorola-branded smartphones, according to Vedomosti, citing Alexei Klochkov, executive director of Lenovo's mobile division in Eastern Europe. Now all the manufacturer’s smartphones will be released under the Lenovo Moto brand, which will be presented to the public on February 26 at the MWC 2017 in Barcelona.

Lenovo bought Motorola Mobility from Google for $ 2.91 billion in 2014. Motorola's main value was not the brand, but the technology and patents that the company owns.

According to the MTS operator, Lenovo devices occupy third place in the Russian market with a share of 8%. In second place are Apple smartphones (11.1%), and in the first - Samsung (21.6%). According to other sources, Lenovo accounted for 7.5% of sales in Russia in December 2016, while the share of smartphones under the Motorola brand was only 0.3%.

The Motorola brand is being eliminated for several reasons. First, they have already completely forgotten it. The second - fans of the old Motorola are not interested in devices manufactured by Lenovo, since Motorola of the Chinese manufacturer is "fake".

A representative of one of the retailers notes that the liquidation of the Motorola brand and the release of smartphones under the new Lenovo Moto brand will have little effect on sales. Now users in this niche are interested, first of all, in the technical characteristics and price of the device, and only then - in the manufacturer.

Motorola is not the first known brand to be eliminated by its owner in the last few years. So, in October 2014, Microsoft liquidated the Nokia brand that it had previously acquired , renaming the manufactured smartphones to Microsoft Lumia, and then completely closed production and resold this asset.