"Lenovo's profit reached $220 million for the quarter, compared with $162 million in the same period a year ago. Revenue rose 13 percent year over year to $9.8 billion."
This is the way CRN reports the results of the last quarter for Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo which recently became the world's number one PC vendor. One of the key features of Lenovo is that they have fully supported retailers and the integration channel as their preferred way to access customers. This has meant that customers receive a supported outlet which can assist them to manouver through the options and changes which the PC market always holds.
One of the key observations in the article from CRN is that much of the success is bolstered with strong tablet and smart phone sales even though Lenovo has yet to introduce smart phones to the North American market. They are however strong in their native Chinese market in this segment and appear to be looking for ways to enter the North American smart phone field effectively.
They have been seen as a potential suitor for Blackberry although recent articles have indicated that they have been blocked in this area due to concerns over the Chinese government involvement and Blackberry's strong presence in key strategic markets like military, finance and other government departments.
Lenovo has been aggressive in launching new products with light weight laptops, new tablets with both Android and Windows 8 based operating systems, and a new line of servers. Recently they have teamed up with EMC to offer a strong storage solution selection designed to respond to growing data storage needs in mid size and SMB markets. This is an area of the market that is gaining strength as businesses start to grow their data storage with ERM, CRM and Document Management Systems all requiring much larger storage sizes.
With a strong market presence and the profit growth that is being shown Lenovo is an increasingly important player in the world wide PC market. With strong brand presence with the Thinkpad, Thinkcenter, and Thinkserver lines their products are generally seen as solid, reliable and well supported. With other brands like Dell and HP moving much of their focus to the services side of the IT business Lenovo has been able to fill gaps and convince purchasers that they are going to be around for the long haul supporting their hardware needs.
Their strategy to build on their PC strength with solid tablet and future smart phone products will only help to consolidate the growth and expansion they are targetting. It will be interesting to see if an introduction of their smart phones into North America will be well received given the competitive nature of that market.
Is a Lenovo in your future? If you already have a product from the Brand what has your Lenovo experience been like? Can they keep up the momentum?
Lee K
