Motorola Is on Its Way Out at Lenovo ⇥ techcrunch.com

Jon Russell, TechCrunch:

Lenovo has admitted that it has failed to build on its acquisition of Motorola. The Chinese firm acquired the phone-maker from Google for $2.91 billion in late 2014 and, in its end-of-year earnings report published today, it said the post-deal performance “did not meet expectations.”

That admission underscores why Lenovo plans to phase out the Motorola brand, as it revealed earlier this year, and instead focus on utilizing its own branding. (And perhaps even Razr?!)

Lenovo shipped 66.1 million smartphones over its full-year 2015/2016 and 10.9 million devices in the final quarter of the period. The firm said that Motorola devices contributed just five million to that quarterly tally, and that’s below its target.

Microsoft announced yesterday that they would be exiting the phone hardware market just two years after buying Nokia’s smartphone division. How bizarre is it that we are entering an era without either Motorola or Nokia — the two stalwart companies that pretty much invented the cellphone and its industry — competing for a slice of the market?