Samsung and Apple are dominating the mobile industry right now, so much so that I kind of feel bad for everyone else. That’s not to say that other companies aren’t trying, it’s just that they often compete at a scale that makes them almost invisible. Lenovo aims to change that. The company that you know for making personal computers is also in the smartphone and tablet game. And while you might not know that because you live either in the United States or Western Europe, over in Asia they’re as big as Huawei and ZTE.

Richard Lai from Engadget recently had a chance to sit down with JD Howard, the Vice President of Mobile Internet and Digital Home Business Group at Lenovo, for a quick chat about the business and where it’s headed. He says that an $800 million factory that’s been in the pipeline for well over a year is finally starting to come online, and it’ll be able to make 100 million phones a year. To put that number into some perspective, Samsung estimates that this year they’ll sell 100 million Galaxy S and Galaxy Note phones out of a total 300 million smartphones.

But still, why is Lenovo building their own factory instead of calling Foxconn?

“When you control your own supply chain … you can actually get to market anywhere between three to six months faster than the competition.”

Speaking about getting to market, nearly all of Lenovo’s devices use MediaTek chips. There’s a Qualcomm phone in the portfolio, as well as an Intel SKU, but why no NVIDIA? Howard says the Tegra chip isn’t mainstream enough and that customers aren’t demanding it.

Now we just have to wait for them to bring their flagships to the West.

http://youtu.be/CYmq-jUVi_4