Lenovo Group Ltd will lay off 10 percent of staff after sales of Motorola handsets fell by a third, raising doubts over the personal computer giant's bet that a brand it bought for nearly $3 billion will help it become a global smartphone leader. The company on Thursday said its quarterly net profit was halved as its mobile division lost nearly $300 million. Lenovo said it plans to cut about 3,200 non-manufacturing jobs with a one-time cost of $600 million.

The company hopes that the restructuring would yield savings of about $1.35 billion on an annual basis. But the difficulty in selling handsets, combined with a continuously shrinking global market for PCs, meant the firm was facing its "toughest market environment in recent years", Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing warned.

Motorola, bought from Google last year for $2.91 billion, shipped 5.9 million handsets in the quarter, a 31 percent decline from a year earlier. Yang cited poor sales in Brazil and China, saying Lenovo would prioritize marketing smartphones outside its home turf, where market saturation and price wars have hobbled firms from Samsung to domestic startup Xiaomi.