According to the latest figures from the International Data Corporation (IDC) released earlier this week Lenovo continues to lead the pack in PC sales globally. This is the sixth quarter in a row that’s been the case, and the Chinese hardware manufacturer now enjoys 20% market share.
Speaking at the company’s launch event for its new range of Yoga tablets and laptops in London yesterday, Aymar de Lencquesaing, senior vice president and president of EMEA at Lenovo says that PC sales are only part of Lenovo’s success story and that the company already ships more smartphones and tablets than PCs, even though it came to these product categories later.
“We aim to ship 100 million mobile devices by the end of this year,” De Lencquesaing says, “and we’re well on the way to that goal”. He says the company aims to have 1.8 billion smartphones in the market by 2018. While the South African market gets Lenovo’s all-in-one PCs, laptops and tablets it has yet to see its smartphones, though the company has rolled them out in other select African markets.
Lenovo has made two high-profile acquisitions this year, including IBM’s X86 Server Business to boost its enterprise capabilities and the recent acquisition of Motorola Mobility Business from Google, a deal that it hopes will be closed by the end of 2014 and one that De Lencquesaing says will make it the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world.
Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo says reaching the 20% mark in global PC share “is a great milestone for Lenovo” and that the company reached that measure even faster than it expected to.
“While others have been looking for a game plan that works, we have been executing ours and the results speak for themselves. Not only have we reached another record high and solidified our PC leadership position for the sixth straight quarter, we have diversified our business at the same time.
“We are number two in the growing PC-plus-tablet market and number three in global tablet sales and servers. And we will soon be number three in worldwide smartphones.”
Yuanqing says that in order to maintain this momentum the company needs to “keep finding new growth engines”. While the PC market was the first area in which Lenovo saw global success and remains the company’s core business, by adding “mobile, enterprise and ecosystem” the company is “prepared to ignite our second stage rocket, and drive Lenovo even higher, even faster”.
Asked how it is performing in the South African market specifically a Lenovo representative told Stuff these figures aren’t yet available but says region-specific figures will be made available by the IDC before the end of the year.
