After Lenovo recently showed off a flexible device that can wrap around a user’s wrist, the Chinese technology firm’s head of mobile said that bendable smartphones could be a reality in five years.

The concept of CPlus, which has a 4.26-inch flexible display and runs Google’s Android mobile operating system was unveiled last month by Lenovo. If Lenovo does decides to commercialize the product, it could do so within five years even though the product is not currently on sale and may never see the light of day.

“We will discover a whole new suite of opportunities with flexible displays. It’s hard to put an exact time frame on it. I think this is a product that could come to market in the next five years … the next couple is a bit aggressive, in particular because the equation of technology, novelty and price point. So you have to have a product that you can deliver the market that makes it a good value proposition,” Aymar de Lencquesaing, co-president of Lenovo’s mobile business group, said during an interview last week at the Viva Technology conference in Paris.

In an overall market which is slowing, as device makers look to differentiate their products from rivals, Lenovo has been experimenting with new features on smartphones. An augmented reality smartphone was recently unveiled by the Chinese firm.

According to Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources bendable phones which could be released in 2017 is reportedly being worked up by Samsung.

Intense competition from younger Chinese upstarts such as OPPO and Vivo is being faced by Lenovo – which also owns Motorola and this new revelation comes amidst such market environment. According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Lenovo got knocked out by these new rivals even though the company was in the top five list of vendors by market share at the end of last year.

To compete with the likes of Samsung, Apple and Huawei – the three biggest smartphone players, the company is now trying hard to ramp up its market share.

“The phone industry is such that you have two players with more than 10 percent share and many others under 10 (percent), we are one of them. We are going to try to continue to aggressively gain share to get to market position that gives us a scale effect,” Lencquesaing told CNBC.

Lencquesaing said that Lenovo has been helped to enter new markets after the acquisition of Motorola in 2014. Business expansion would be accelerated by Lenovo into a number of markets in Latin America, North America and India as well as branch into Western Europe, the executive said.

Domestic manufacturers have been looking to increase presence in other markets as the Chinese smartphone market slows down. while Xiaomi has launched devices in India, Huawei has been expanding into Western Europe.

In many of the emerging markets where internet connection isn’t great, Lenovo wants to have a broader presence is amongst its new strategies. Selling directly to consumers through online channels in markets like India is the focus of its efforts.

“What we did in India, we took a very partial approach and launched an online channel and now have 9 percent market share but that’s only from online. It’s efficient but does not address (the) whole market. It’s the nature of those countries, the nature of India and China … still a large number of consumers are relying on traditional offline channels,” Lencquesaing said.

(Adapted from CNBC)

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