Lenovo: Motorola Acquisition 'Did Not Meet Expectations' (theverge.com)

Lenovo acquired Motorola from Google in 2014. Since then, the Chinese technology conglomerate has been trying to merge Motorola's offering into its large portfolio. But things aren't going as planned. Lenovo on Thursday announced that the "integration efforts did not meet expectations". The company, however, insists that it has drawn many lessons from the experience since the close of the Motorola acquisition, and it is making changes to them quickly.

It's not the best time in the market if you're an Android smartphone maker. There's an increasingly growing competition especially from companies such as Xiaomi, Meizu, Micromax, Yu and others that are making premium smartphones with a razor-thin margin. Any unique feature a smartphone maker introduces is seen replicated in others' offerings within weeks.

Comments

This should have been obvious...

[__aaclcg7560]

No one wants a cellphone that phone homes to China.

Sad to see this happen to Moto

[allquixotic]

My first "new-age" smartphone (discounting those horrid old 3G Windows Mobile phones with a stylus in the mid-2000s) was a Motorola Droid 2. For a number of years, Motorola was well-known and respected among smartphone users for:

  - Shipping fairly high-end kit, though perhaps not always the latest and greatest
  - Very good power efficiency (for Android)
  - A lack of the excessive amount of crapware you get on most phones; only the bare minimum the carrier forces on you
  - A close-to-vanilla Android experience
  - Great build quality and premium feel
  - Reasonable prices - they were never the most expensive in the marketplace
  - Generous battery capacity -- which, when combined with the power efficiency of their tuned SoCs, led to awesome battery life without any external batteries or extended batteries
  - One of the less-hyped smartphone manufacturers (compared to Apple and Samsung) that still churned out well-engineered products and listened to their customers

Unfortunately these virtues seem to have fallen by the wayside to an extent, and the dominance of Samsung, (LG?), and Apple has pushed them out of the market it seems.

The only effect Lenovo could possibly have on them is to force them to cheapen their build. Everything Lenovo touches turns to cheap plastic.

Whose expectations?

[hey!]

My default expectation in any high profile acquisition is that the target company's stockholders will do well, the CEO of the acquiring company will make a bundle, and the stockholders of the acquiring company will take a bath.