MoO3 as electrode material for lithium ion batteries (LIBs) suffers from the poor ionic and electronic conductivity, while hybridizing nanostructured MoO3 with carbon-based materials is regarded as an efficient strategy. Herein, we report the facile synthesis of MoO3 nanoplates within foam-like carbon nanoflakes (CNFs) via the pyrolysis of molybdenum 2-ethtlhexanoate (C48H90MoO12) at a low temperature of 300 degrees C under ambient atmosphere. Mixing C48H90MoO12 with the highly porous foam-like CNFs allows the sufficient pyrolysis of Mo precursor, which can readily crystallize into MoO3 with plate morphology. The loading amount of MoO3 within CNFs can be easily and precisely controlled by adjusting the relative amount of C48H90MoO12/CNEs, while the plate morphology of MoO3 can be well preserved. The structural characteristics as well as the formation mechanism are investigated. When used as anode material for LIBs, optimized MoO3/CNFs displays superior lithium storage performance, delivering a high discharge capacity of 791 mA h/g after 100 cycles at 500 mA/g and even similar to 600 mA h/g at a high rate of 2000 mA/g. Moreover, the present pyrolysis synthetic strategy can be generally applied for low-cost and large-scale fabrication of various MoO3/carbon nanocomposites, which demonstrates great potential in the development of high-performance electrodes for electrochemical energy-storage. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.