Geely buys majority stake in troubled cellphone maker Meizu

Chinese language automobile large Geely has bought a majority stake within the now-small smartphone maker Meizu. Bloomberg stories that Meizu can be run as an unbiased firm below Xingli Know-how, one other tech model below Geely’s umbrella. That stated, the pair are anticipated to work collectively on new merchandise, and Xingli has already expressed plans to make a giant splash within the AR/VR area.

In case you’ve been studying Engadget for lengthy sufficient, you’ll have seemingly seen Meizu’s early rise on the daybreak of the smartphone increase. Sadly, it discovered its lunch being eaten by different Chinese language upstarts, together with Xiaomi, and wound up remaining a small participant. Again in 2015, Alibaba determined to take a stake within the firm simply because it discovered itself distracted by numerous boondoggles, together with the baffling-in-retrospect resolution to construct telephones with Ubuntu.

Geely, in the meantime, is maybe greatest identified within the West because the controlling proprietor of Volvo, Polestar and Lotus, all of which have been pushed in direction of electrification. In fact, with automobiles changing into extra like telephones (and telephones changing into such a vital a part of most automobiles) the concept of automakers shopping for in to the cellphone area makes loads of sense. As Reuters stories, each the cellular and automobile companies are slowing down, and so deeper integration is perhaps one technique to nook the market.