Fabio Capocchi, Motorola's General Manager for EMEA, on the evolution of the brand: “The challenge has been not to be a ‘copy paste’ of the competition”

When you think of Motorola, what comes to mind? It's easy for pieces that marked an era to appear, from the StarTAC to the Razr V3, or even that attempt to recover the premium experience with the foldable Razr from 2019. That legacy is still alive, although it hasn't always been accompanied by a perception aligned with the brands that dominate the highest range. In recent years, Motorola has worked to translate that heritage into a contemporary premium identity, supported by design, materials, and its own style. That duality between what Motorola represents today and what it aspires to be raises a natural question: How does the company interpret this moment? To answer it, we spoke with Fabio Capocchi, vice president and general manager of Motorola for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa within the Mobile Business Group, the unit that concentrates the brand's smartphone strategy in the region. He took office in 2022 with the aim of accelerating its growth in an increasingly competitive market. He lives in Spain and has extensive experience in the technology sector, with stages at EPSON, ASUS, and the Lenovo group. Before delving into its vision, it's worth pausing for a moment on where Motorola stands beyond what we've expressed in the first lines of this text. The company arrives at this stage with real growth, a more defined identity, and a catalog that expresses better than ever who it wants to be. It's not the gigantic Motorola of the 2000s, but neither is it a brand that has lost its focus.

In 2024, the company's shipments grew 24% year-on-year, according to Counterpoint Research, reaching its highest historical figure in smartphones. Even so, it remains far from the global podium, dominated by Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi, and operates in single-digit shares. The contrast with its past is evident. In the mid-2000s, in the Razr era, Motorola became the second-largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, with shares exceeding 20% and only behind Nokia. Since 2014 it has been part of Lenovo, which bought it from Google for $2.91 billion. Today it is no longer that giant, but a firm in the process of reinvention: smaller in share, but with sustained growth, a strong commitment to the lifestyle tech narrative.

Motorola is transforming, and the Edge 70 plays a key role in that process

At the beginning of the interview, Fabio reviews the moment in which Motorola redefined its approach for Europe and other territories where the brand wanted to advance. He explains that they detected that in the market "something was missing": a proposal with its own identity, with recognizable values and a defined DNA. From there, the intention was not to join the usual dynamics of the sector, but to strengthen a clearer brand personality. That idea is condensed into a phrase that stands out in the conversation: "the challenge has been not to be a 'copy paste' of the competition, not to run a race on the technical specification". From there, he explains that the priority has been "to try to talk about the end user, with a unique, very striking DNA", with devices that are not defined only by numbers, but by the feeling of using something with its own character. For Fabio, design is not an accessory element, but an aspect that has guided Motorola's recent evolution. He speaks of a commitment to materials that generate different sensations, such as vegan leather, and of a chromatic work that they develop together with Pantone to identify colors that connect better with users. That effort seeks to express a more defined and coherent identity with what the brand wants to project today.

"We have created a premium product and to be premium you have to have a premium aesthetic, it has to be in some way a bit disruptive. In this sense we have created an incredibly light, thin product without any compromise. So with this product we want to put within a single product, and we want to see that every time we create a product, all our experience and all our DNA that we have developed over the years, which is why it can be clearly identified as a Motorola DNA product, with an absolutely incredible technical specifications."

Fabio implies that the Motorola Edge 70 should function as the meeting point between design and functionality. He explains that the brand was looking for a very light and very thin device that, even so, offered more battery than other reference models. The Edge 70, which we have been able to analyze in Xataka, integrates a 4,800 mAh battery, one of the most outstanding aspects of this ultra-thin mobile. That balance, he assures, is what allows the product to faithfully represent the direction that Motorola wants to consolidate in the upper part of its catalog.

Throughout the interview, Fabio insists that this launch does not stem from an isolated decision, but from an accumulated process of design, engineering, and brand vision. He describes the Edge 70 as the synthesis of those years of work and the team's involvement. And when we ask him for a definition in a few words, he responds:

“I believe that the Edge 70 for us represents our maximum effort to summarize within a product the last three years of development, which go from the design part, the technological part, but also the passion of the people (…) for such a fine design, but with a product that is cool to see (…) we have worked miracles to change the design of the motherboard and, finally, which for me is the most important thing, is the passion that people are putting in.”

Spain comes up in the conversation as a mirror in which Fabio recognizes elements that, according to him, also define Motorola: history, vitality, and a very marked identity palette. That parallelism sums up the way he interprets the evolution of the brand and the emphasis on design, color, and style that supports his lifestyle tech vision.

“Europe is a source of global inspiration. In Spain, for its part, you find everything, and it is a super active, super happy, very sunny country and at the same time has a lot of history. And if I am going to make a parallel with Motorola, it seems to me that we are hand in hand, because Motorola invented what is the mobile phone. Now, taking up this parallelism with Spain, I like it because Spain is very full of important history and has this second youth, but full of life, which coincides with us”.

Motorola arrives at this stage with a weighty heritage and an ambition that aims higher than in previous years. From the icons of the past to the recent foldables and now the Edge 70, the company is trying to reinforce its own identity in the upper part of its catalog, with a clear ambition in the premium field. From the outside, the challenge does not seem to be to maintain the pace of growth, but to make its way in an aspirational field that, for many users who are looking for a mobile phone with presence, continues to be dominated by Apple and Samsung. If that change in perception takes hold, we will see it over time.