Newsletter
The Sales Director for Asia Pacific at Lenovo, Mr. William Tsai, said that the company expects its struggling Moto brand to do better in the near future, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. According to him, sales of Moto-branded smartphones have already seen a marked increase in the United States, as well as two of the fastest-growing emerging economies in the world – India and Brazil. The brand has also apparently been doing remarkably well in a number of emerging East Asian markets, including Thailand and the Philippines. With its fortunes on the rise in some of the most critical markets around the world, the Chinese tech giant now wants to try and gain a larger chunk of the smartphone market in Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, and Australia in the coming months.
With Samsung and Apple continuing to retain their iron grip over the premium segment of the global smartphone market, the focus of most other vendors has shifted to the mid-range segment, which is where the industry has seen the fastest growth over the past couple of years. That being the case, Moto’s growing clout in the online retail channel in India has helped the company recover some lost ground in the country in recent times. While Xiaomi is still the undisputed leader of the online smartphone market in the country, the Moto brand has seen notable success with its fourth-generation Moto G devices over the past year and is expected to do even better with the recently launched Moto G5 and the Moto G5 Plus.
The company has apparently increased its online business in India rapidly over the past few years. While online sales accounted for only five percent of its overall sales in the country in 2014, they now account for more than a third of its total sales in India. According to information provided by Mr. Tsai, Moto is already the fourth largest phone vendor globally (outside of China), after Apple, Samsung, and LG, and with Lenovo reportedly holding between 30 to 40 percent of the Brazilian market, the company seems pretty well positioned in two of the largest markets in the Americas going forward.