You may struggle to take Lenovo seriously after Ashton Kutcher, its new "product engineer," knelt before CEO Yang Yuanqing at the Yoga Tablet launch in Beijing. But this is the same Chinese company that's making a second-round purchase from IBM -- previously for its PC division with $1.75 billion, and this time for its x86 server business with $2.3 billion. Merely a week later (and just in time for Chinese New Year), Lenovo announced that it's also snapping up Motorola's smartphone business from Google for $2.9 billion, with the intention to crack the North American, Latin American and Western European mobile markets.
When combined, Lenovo and Motorola ("LenoMo?" "Lenola?") will leap from fifth place to third in terms of worldwide smartphone shipments between Q4 2012 and Q3 2013, placing them ahead of LG, Sony and Nokia, but they still trail far behind Samsung and Apple. Looking at its home turf, though, will the deal do much to help Lenovo maintain its number two position in the increasingly competitive market in China? Or perhaps even knock Samsung off the top of the chart? Not directly, no.
