PRESS: Lenovo brand to return to Russia’s smartphone market

MOSCOW, Jul 22 (PRIME) -- China’s Lenovo is going to return to the Russian market with a own smartphone brand and has signed an agreement on exclusive distribution with Mobilidi, a unit of holding RDC Group, which sells Xiaomi and Hisense smartphones, business daily Kommersant reported on Monday.

Under the agreement, Lenovo smartphones will appear in the country in online store Lenovo.Store, retail chain Hitbuy, which has outlets in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg, and chains of other large retailers.

Svyaznoy-Euroset will also sell a new line of Lenovo smartphones. “In previous years Lenovo held a significant part of the smartphone market. The company has all the chances to strengthen positions in a moderate price segment with its return,” the seller’s Director of Procurement Mikhail Komkov said.

M.Video-Eldorado Group said it is holding talks with Mobilidi on Lenovo sales.

A source on the retail market told the daily Lenovo devices would cost 6,000–14,000 rubles and the company could win up to 5% of the market in two years with active marketing.

Mobile Research Group analyst Eldar Murtazin doubted that Lenovo could successfully rival Samsung, Honor and Xiaomi by the price-performance ratio. The brand is popular by laptops, but not smartphones, he said.

In 2017, Lenovo led among all the Chinese brands on the smartphone market in Russia with 7% of sales in units, but official deliveries of the company stopped in April the same year. Lenovo decided to focus on promotion of the Motorola brand, which it purchased in 2014 from Google. The initiative failed, and Lenovo had only 1% of the market in January 2018.

(62.8666 rubles – U.S. $1)

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