Lenovo adds a gaming service to boost smartphone sales

To offset falling PC sales and reduce its reliance on ThinkPad notebooks, Lenovo Group is adding a gaming service that the computer maker says can help it overtake Samsung Electronics in smartphones in China.

Lenovo Game World will include social-networking features, software reviews and gameplay tips when it starts in the third quarter, offering popular titles like “Fruit Ninja” for devices such as the computer maker’s Ideaphone K900 that run Google’s Android operating system.

Software and services underpin Chief Executive Officer Yang Yuanqing’s push to sell more handsets as demand for personal computers slides. While Lenovo’s app store has logged more than 1 billion downloads since it opened in 2010, the company is looking to Game World for an edge in the biggest market for handsets, where mobile-game sales of $1.6 billion this year will rise about 50 percent annually for the next three years, researcher Analysys International predicts.

Unlike the United States, where Google and Amazon.com dominate sales of Android applications, China has hundreds of companies offering mobile software. Bloomberg