Lenovo’s acquisition of Motorola wasn’t as successful as they hoped, reports massive loss in Q1 2016

Lenovo purchased Motorola from Google for around $2.9 billion. At the time they bought the brand, Google’s work with the company and the software had granted Motorola some stature among Android purists and power users. Sadly, it seems like Lenovo hasn’t been able to do much with that momentum and if its annual reports are to be believed, that integration has failed. While Motorola did sell around 5 million phones between January and March, from a total of 10.9 million phones sold, that number is still indicative of an 85 percent decline in the China market. PocketNow reports that Lenovo’s global revenue fell 3 percent and that year-on-year quarterly revenue is down 19 percent. Despite the setbacks, Lenovo claims that they’re learning from their mistakes. They attribute the loss in market share, in part, to their shift to an “open market” strategy, which bypasses carriers to provide users the devices directly. Lenovo is, however, pushing its ZUK phones in that segment. Tablets reportedly did very well, as did mobile phone sales outside China, but China is one of the largest smartphone markets and a loss there is very significant. Lenovo also claim to be working very hard to get their US business back on track.