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Motorola Mobile loses Greater China head

China head of Motorola Mobile resigns as the company continues to struggle to stay afloat in the Chinese smartphone market.
Written by Liu Jiayi, Contributor

Motorola Mobile's Greater China president, Meng Pu, has resigned as the handset maker continues to struggle to in the country's smartphone market. 

According to a Tencent report Friday, the senior executive resigned on June 28 and is now the president of 21Vianet, China's biggest carrier-neutral Internet data center services provider, where he is responsible for the company's global operations and brand alleviation.

Meng followed his boss Sanjay Jha, then-COO of Qualcomm who joined Motorola in 2010, when the company still held over 50 percent of the Android market share in China. It sold 1 million smartphone units in first-quarter 2011 alone, compared with 2.2 million in 2010, Jha had said in an interview published in June 2011.

But things headed south quickly, and both Jha and Meng struggled to revive Moto in the region.

After Google's US$12.5 billion acquisition in August 2011, Motorola shed its global presence significantly including pulling out of the South Korea market and sacking more than 5,200 staff. After two rounds of layoffs in China, Meng's job description seemed to have changed to staff firing and consolation.

Motorola now has only 200 staff in the country and sold less than 400,000 phones in the first quarter of this year, down 60 percent year-on-year. It has fallen far behind Samsung, HTC, ZTE, and Huawei, according to an ifeng report published in June.

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