Goodbye, Motorola. Sort of.
The name "Motorola" isn't going away, but the specific Motorola brand certainly is. According to CNET, Lenovo is ditching the Motorola when it comes to smartphones. Motorola will continue as a division under Lenovo, but new devices will eventually transition to "Moto" branding, not "Motorola."
You'll still likely see Motorola's traditional "M" winged logo on smartphones, but Lenovo will also be pushing its big, blue logo as well—now using the new "Moto by Lenovo" label, reports CNET's Roger Cheng. So, Motorola isn't really gone for good, but Lenovo's smartphones aren't going to be quite as blatantly "Motorola" going forward. The company will slap the "Moto for Lenovo" label on its high-end smartphones and unify its budget smartphones under its "Vibe" brand.
Though the move feels sudden, given Lenovo just acquired Motorola Mobility from Google in 2014, it's not entirely unexpected given Motorola's slow descent over the past many years. As Cheng notes, the name Motorola used to carry a ton of weight in the mobile phone world—especially since Motorola was the first company on the planet to demonstrate a prototype cellular phone back in 1973. It was also the first to sell an actual, clunky cell phone: the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which came out in 1984.
Motorola revitalized itself with its Razr phones back in the mid-2000s, but it's argued that the company's decision to cling to its flagship instead of pushing harder (and earlier) into smartphones signaled the beginning of the end.
"When Jobs introduced the first iPhone, Zander's Motorola was still pushing Razrs, pumping up sales by taking new variations further and further downmarket. The result: ever-lower profit margins. One analyst calculated that the company made, on average, only about $5 per device," describes a 2014 Chicago Magazine article titled, rather grimly, "What Happened to Motorola."
Motorola spun off Motorola Mobility as a separate company in January 2011. Google acquired the latter in August of that year, but ended up selling to Lenovo in January 2014. As of the third quarter of last year, Motorola's market share for smartphones was just 5.3 percent, trailing Samsung, Apple, and Huawei—according to Strategy Analytics.