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Lenovo Spending $800 Million to Boost Smartphones, Tablets

Lenovo today announced plans to invest about $800 million in smartphone and tablet development over the next five years in an effort to boost its mobile lineup.

May 7, 2012

Lenovo today announced plans to invest about $800 million in smartphone and tablet development over the next five years in an effort to boost its mobile lineup.

Lenovo held a groundbreaking ceremony for a new industrial park in Wuhan, China, which will be homebase for this new mobile scheme. The facility, dubbed the Lenovo (Wuhan) Industrial Base, is scheduled to open its doors in October 2013.

Lenovo said the facility will mainly focus on the R&D, production, and global sales of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Lenovo predicted that Wuhan will help produce sales revenue of about $1.5 billion by 2014 and $8 billion in the next five years. It will also create about 10,000 jobs in the next few years, Lenovo said.

"As an industry leader, we are aggressively moving forward into the PC Plus era, and with our Mobile Internet Digital Home group actively engaged, we are accelerating development in smart phones, tablets, and other mobile Internet terminal markets," Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Group chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

According to , Lenovo was not among the top five global handset makers during the first quarter. That honor went to Samsung, Nokia, Apple, LG, and RIM. Lenovo, however, said it is a top-three smartphone maker in China with 16.5 percent market share.

Thursday put Lenovo in the No. 4 spot for global tablet shipments behind Apple, Samsung, and Amazon - though Apple's iPad had 68 percent of the market. Last month, for a new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet called the IdeaTab S2109 (above) with a screen similar to the one Apple used for older versions of the iPad.

Lenovo is still tops, however, when it comes to the PC market. In the third quarter of 2011, Lenovo surpassed Dell to become the second-largest global commercial notebook PC supplier behind HP, iSuppli said. In China, it secured 35.5 percent market share, according to iSuppli.