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Lenovo/Motorola could be third biggest smartphone vendor

The combined market share of the two companies puts them just behind Samsung and Apple, according to one analyst firm.

Nic Healey Senior Editor / Australia
Nic Healey is a Senior Editor with CNET, based in the Australia office. His passions include bourbon, video games and boring strangers with photos of his cat.
Nic Healey

With Lenovo buying Motorola from Google, it instantly became the number three smartphone vendor globally.

Lenovo's Vibe X smartphone. (Credit: Lenovo)

At least, that's according to analyst firm Strategy Analytics. On its blog the company notes that taken together, Lenovo and Motorola have a 6 per cent global market share when it comes to smartphones — based on the firm's 2013 data.

Such is the dominance of Samsung, at 32 per cent, and Apple, at 15 per cent, that this is enough to boost the newly combined Lenovo and Motorola entity to number three in the world.

It's also a reminder for Western consumers that Lenovo has a very solid base of smartphone users in China and other areas, even if the phones have been slow to arrive in the US and Australia.

Opening up these other markets via the known Motorola brand is obviously a key reason for Lenovo's purchase, along with the patent licenses.