BizChina

Lenovo Group Ltd said on Thursday it will speed up efforts to expand offline retailing channels and marketing this year to revive its faltering smartphone business.

The move makes the world's largest PC maker the latest Chinese company to bank on bricks-and-mortar retailers to spur growth as the country's smartphone market is reaching saturation.

Lei Jun, Founder & CEO of Xiaomi

Lei Jun, founder and chairman of Xiaomi Corp, one of the largest smartphone vendors in China, said Chinese innovation has started to win world recognition as more foreign firms are learning from their Chinese tech counterparts.

China's Internet sector has seen explosive growth in the past several years. This is not only because of the huge market but also innovations made by China's Internet companies, Lei said at the China Development Forum on Saturday.

Argentine soccer superstar Lionel Messi will have to ditch his Samsung phone for a device from Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co.

Huawei said on Friday it signed the 28-year-old FC Barcelona striker as a global ambassador to promote its consumer electronics and corporation. Messi had been endorsing Samsung Electronics Co's smartphones over the past years.

WeChat, which connects more than half a billion individual users via the mobile messaging service, is launching a separate application for enterprise clients.

The app, named Qiye Weixin or Enterprise WeChat in English, is under beta testing and is expected to be rolled out in the next couple of months.

WeChat, owned by Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd, said in a statement on Thursday that the enterprise messaging service is designed for work-related communication.