Lenovo’s Motorola purchase is its IBM moment in the smartphone business

Lenovo makes smartphones. Say that aloud in the West, and you’ll be greeted with scoffs or disbelief. That’s because not many know about Lenovo’s phone business outside of Asia. For a company with grand ambitions of taking the phone business global, this had to change and quickly. Lenovo tried to break out of its China comfort zone with big launches in India in 2013, doing fairly well and will soon now have a second wave of phones hitting Indian stores.   But the story is totally different in the US and much of Europe. For years now, Lenovo has been linked with buying companies in the smartphone business in their bid to gain a stronger foothold in the market. BlackBerry seems to have been the most frequent link-up, but that never materialised due to a variety of reasons. According to Frank Gillett, part of  Forrester’s Business Technology Futures team, now that Lenovo has its big Western company in the form of Motorola, it is assured of more coverage in the press, more eyeballs in the aisle and a lot more traction with carriers in the US. The Motorola association is Lenovo’s golden ticket.   If that sounds like a beginning to a story you have already heard before, that’s because you have. IBM, whose PC business Lenovo purchase in 2005, turned out to be the Midas touch the company needed to establish itself in the PC business. Today Lenovo, on the back of the ultrapopular Thinkpad line, is the top PC vendor in the world. That same wild success has not been easy to come by in the smartphone business, even though the company is the second largest smartphone vendor in China. Almost exactly nine years later, Lenovo has the right tools to make a more concerted effort in the Western markets.