Lenovo results: tops in work, desktops, 6.5m phones shipped
updated 10:15 pm EST, Wed February 8, 2012
Lenovo Q4 results show banner gains
Lenovo as part of record results for its fall quarter clinched the top spots in key parts of the PC business. While it wouldn't give exact numbers, it mostly sided with IDC rankings that saw it claim 14 percent of the computer market worldwide, or second place. It was now large enough that it was the leader for shipments in work PCs of any kind as well as in home desktops.
Notebooks as a whole saw shipments up 41 percent and the revenue from them up 30 percent, making them the core of Lenovo's growth and well beyond other Windows PC builders. Desktops weren't as brisk, but still managed a 32 percent boost to shipments and 39 percent to revenue.
The company claimed a smaller, but significant stake in mobile. At 6.5 million phones shipped worldwide, it wasn't in danger of upsetting larger cellphone makers. However, it now had "double-digit" market share in China, the only real market for its cellphones. Not quite half of those devices were its Android smartphones, like the LePhone S2 (shown), putting it behind fellow Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE.
Tablets had "strong momentum," according to CEO Yang Yuanqing. In declining to give numbers, however, he implied that performance was still well short of larger tablet competitors like Amazon or Apple.
Overall, Lenovo managed $8.4 billion in revenue and $154 million in profit, or respective 44 percent and 55 percent hikes versus a year ago.
The company credited its overall rise to its recent strategy of "protect and attack," where it makes sure that its market position in a key area like China is strong and 'attacks' from a more secure stance. Although it has led to conservative growth in some areas, Lenovo also hasn't been nearly as prone to losing market share in notebooks to Apple's iPad as its main rivals Acer, Dell, and HP.
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Joined: Jan 2002
We switched, but...
Based solely on financial considerations, we switched to Lenovo from Dell laptops for deploying on campus this past year. They seem to be made well enough, but still suffer the stench of IBM with regard to clunky design.