Chinese personal computer maker Lenovo Group launched a 5G-upgradable smartphone - the Motorola z3 - on Thursday at the Lenovo Tech World 2018 in Beijing.
The company said that the phone is the first of its kind in the world.
"Some smartphone makers have been ramping up efforts for 5G products recently, claiming that they would be the first to launch the products next year. But the competition has obviously come to an end, since you can see the launch of Lenovo's 5G smartphone right now," Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo said that the conference.
The company will also launch a new 5G product at the beginning of next year, Lenovo said in a statement it sent to the Global Times on Thursday.
The launch of the Motorola z3, which is seen by many industry insiders as a move to revive the company's phone business, followed media reports saying that Lenovo is considering the sale of its Motorola unit. It bought the business from Google in 2014.
Yang denied the reports during the conference, calling them "purely made up," and he said Lenovo will increase investment in the mobile phone segment.
Earlier media reports said the acquisition had fallen short of expectations, since the Lenovo-Motorola group had fallen out of the ranks of top global smartphone vendors, supplanted by other Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei, Oppo and Vivo.
Ken Hu, deputy chairman and rotating chairman of Huawei Technologies, also announced during the 2018 Summer Davos Forum in North China's Tianjin Municipality that Huawei will launch its first batch of phones backed with 5G technology as early as 2019.
