Lenovo may expand partnership with Reliance Retail: Report

Smartphone company Lenovo is most likely to expand its partnership with Reliance Retail to distribute more of its smartphones as it wishes to strengthen it’s hold in smaller towns and cities in India.

In conversation with Financial Express , Sudhin Mathur, director for smartphone business at Lenovo India said, “We need to test (the networks) because it needs a special software to enabled on to the phone. That is an ongoing process and we will be looking at different price tier.” The company aims to be among the top five world’s fastest-growing smartphone market in 2016. The company sold 8 million phones in India in 2015.

Mathur also stated that. “This is calendar year first quarter. We have already launched five phones and if I do a simple multiplier, then there are a lot of phones.” A previous report points out that in February, Lenovo said more than half of the devices it sells in India this year under the ‘Moto’ and ‘Vibe’ brands will be manufactured at the facility in Tamil Nadu.

In August last year, Lenovo had partnered with contract manufacturer Flextronics to start making Motorola and Lenovo smartphones in India at the latter’s unit at Sriperumbudur near Chennai. The plant has a capacity of six million units. In 2014, Lenovo had acquired Motorola from Google in a $2.9 billion (roughly Rs. 19,722 crores) deal. The company had said it will continue to sell the US brand as a separate label in India, which is one of its “most important” markets. Lenovo and Motorola sold over 8 million devices last year, a 1.6x growth of 2014 when its sales stood at 4.9 million units.

Disclaimer: Reliance Retail is owned by Reliance Industries, who also own Network18, the publisher of Firstpost and tech2