Lenovo won’t be adding any Microsoft Windows smartphones to its lineup because the company isn’t convinced Microsoft is committed to the Windows mobile operating system, says Chief Operating Officer Gianfranco Lanci.
Lenovo’s smartphone sales have struggled, and the company recently laid off several hundred Motorola unit employees.
But the global PC leader also continues to face challenges on that front. Lanci told the event that computer says continue to slow globally, declining this year and probably the next two.
On the phone front, Lanci was quite pointed in his remarks about Microsoft. .
“We don’t have Windows phones or any plans to introduce a Windows Phone,” Lanci said Tuesday at a technology conference in Europe, according to media reports.
“I don’t see the need to introduce a Windows Phone and I am not convinced Microsoft is supporting the phone for the future.”
NextWeb noted that the Microsoft smartphone effort has been troubled.
“2016 has been especially brutal for Microsoft’s smartphone ambitions,” the news site reported. “2016 has seen two rounds of layoffs from its mobile division, with thousands of development and sales jobs lost. With this in mind, you can hardly blame Lenovo for thinking that Microsoft’s heart isn’t in mobile.”
Lenovo already offers a wide variety of phones running on Android.
The Windows OS platform is the third most popular for phones behind Android and Apple iOS, but it lags far behind, running on fewer than 2 million phones vs. nearly 297 on Android and 44 million on iOS, according to Gartner.
Franco did say that the latest version of Windows was sparking interest among PC buyers.
Lenovo operates one of its two executive headquarters in Morrisville. The other is in Beijing.
