Lenovo and Motorola start making phones in India, with plans to sell offline

Government's Make In India initiative is getting quite a response from various companies around the world. Xiaomi has already started manufacturing and selling the "Made In India" Redmi 2 Prime. This time its Motorola and Lenovo's turn. They plan to manufacture the Lenovo K3 Note and the new Moto E in India.

Lenovo has said that they have already started manufacturing the Moto E in a new factory located in Sriperumbur, Chennai. Moreover, the new facility boasts of a yearly 6-million unit capacity with two manufacturing units. Bengaluru based Flextronics is handling the production for Lenovo and Motorola in these units.

Motorola has also said that they will begin selling devices in brick and mortar stores offline soon. They don't want users to be restricted to just online for buying or experiencing devices. Although we might not see Motorola Experience stores pop-up everywhere but a partnership with established retail chains like Sangeetha Mobiles, The Mobile Store is likely.

Motorola and Lenovo are now an even more integrated whole, with Lenovo giving its entire design, development and engineering wing of the Mobile Business Group to Motorola. Which means essentially Motorola will be responsible for all future smartphone endeavors from Lenovo. There are a few intricacies here, including the 3200 strong workforce layoffs which we will see in the coming months again mostly from Motorola which I will take a look into with another post.

At present, things are looking great for the Make in India initiative, with various smartphone manufacturers pledging their support and other industries soon to follow.