Motorola Sold More Than 10 Million Smartphones In Final Quarter Of 2014

Motorola, which was acquired by China-based Lenovo last October for $2.9 billion, has announced that it has sold over 10 million smartphones in the final quarter of the year 2014. 

When compared to Apple's and Samsung's sales figures, Motorola's numbers are not that mind-blowing. But still, it is a pretty good number. After all, when you combine the smartphone sales of Motorola and its parent company Lenovo, that puts them within the top five biggest phone manufacturers in the world, behind leaders Apple and Samsung and competing with LG and Huawei.

Apart from its Motorola smartphone division, Lenovo also gets its revenues from sales of its laptops and desktop computer products, in which the company is the global market leader. But when it comes to its margins, Lenovo's could be better -- only around 2.8 percent, with a net profit amounting to $253 million.

Overall, sales from the Motorola smartphone division were up 118 percent to $1.9 billion. Combined with Lenovo's sales, they make up 6.6 percent of the global market share. That's a 78 percent increase compared to the final quarter of the previous year. 

Lenovo has been on record saying that it is looking forward to pushing Motorola handsets in mainland China. The company is also positive that its smartphone segment will register a profit in the next year.

Lenovo has been busy with its acquisitions last year. Aside from acquiring Motorola, the Chinese company also bought IBM's server business for a sum of $2.1 billion in October.

On top of that, things are looking good for Motorola devices, especially in rapidly emerging markets like India and of course, China. Just recently, Motorola announced that there are already 1 million reservations for its premium smartphone offering Moto X. In India last year, Motorola had sold 3 million handsets, a huge number of which are Moto E and Moto G smartphones.

Of course, Motorola was acquired by Lenovo in the later part of October only, so it is quite possible that some of the phone brand's success in the early part of the quarter is owed to Google, its owner before it was bought. As many may recall, Motorola was Google's phone maker partner in producing the Nexus 6 smartphone, the tech giant's flagship device for Android 5.0 Lollipop, the newest version of the Android mobile operating system. And lest we forget, Motorola also produced one of the most well-reviewed Android Wear smartwatches, the Moto 360.