14 DAY TRIAL // Chinese mobile phone maker Lenovo is planning to flood the smartphone market with a wide range of new handsets this year, as it is working on no less than 60 models, the latest reports on the matter suggest.
The company is said to be aiming at shipping around 80 million smartphones before the end of 2014, with around 60 million of them expected to be sold in China.
According to DigiTimes, the info comes from China-based it.sohu.com, which claims to have talked with Zhang Hui, Lenovo vice president and China general manager for Mobile Business Group.
Reportedly, Lenovo’s executive has also unveiled that the aforementioned smartphones will be sold both in China and on other markets around the world, and that half of them will feature 4G LTE connectivity.
Undoubtedly, Lenovo’s plans for the smartphone market are big, though the release of such a large number of devices in such a small period of time might not prove to be the best move from the company, as it will leave little room for innovation from one model to another.
However, there’s also the possibility that said executive could have actually been counting different (market specific) flavors of the same smartphone in this figure, and that the actual number of new handsets that the company will bring to the market will be a bit lower.
The Chinese vendor has around 1,000 hardware R&D engineers, along with about the same amount of software R&D employees. The company will also get about 2,000 R&D engineers when Motorola Mobility joins the company.