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Lenovo bets big on Moto brand, will start selling all its phones under that name

By Christian de Looper November 9, 2016

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It looks like Lenovo is banking on the Moto name for the future of its smartphone business. The company quietly unveiled the Moto M on a Chinese website earlier this week, after which it announced that all of its future smartphones would be branded as “Moto” phones.

The shift in branding certainly makes sense for the company, which is hoping to seriously boost its smartphone sales in mainland China. The Motorola name has consistently been popular in the mobile phone industry, most recently thanks to devices like the Moto X, Moto Z, and the budget Moto G.

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It’s important to note that the Lenovo brand isn’t going away — the company will still release computers and tablets under Lenovo, which makes sense considering the fact that Lenovo is a well-established computer maker. In fact, Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo, said the company’s laptop and PC business is still its “bread and butter,” so don’t expect any major changes to Lenovo’s computer business. The news comes after some lackluster financial results from Lenovo.

The rebranding could mean some interesting things for the Moto lineup. It’s currently unknown if the Lenovo Phab will continue to live on, or if the Moto lineup will be expanded to include more devices like Android tablets and larger smartphones.

Combined, the sales of Moto and Lenovo smartphones for the second quarter of 2016 were at around $2 billion, which is down 12 percent from the same period last year. Despite that, it seems as though Lenovo’s smartphone business was up by a hefty 20 percent from the previous quarter, signaling that there may be some growth yet for the company.

While the new Moto M has finally been unveiled in China, there’s no word on international availability just yet.

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