Lenovo’s chairman says worst is over for PC giant and ‘intelligent transformation’ set to reap rewards
- Lenovo has had to weather several volatile PC market cycles, and struggled to integrate its two 2014 acquisitions
- Lenovo aims to become a leader in data centre operations, leveraging its global PC platform
It has taken almost four years but China’s Lenovo Group has begun to see some rewards from the multibillion dollar acquisitions of IBM’s commodity server business and Google’s Motorola Mobility smartphone unit, with the company recently regaining the crown from HP as the world’s biggest personal computer (PC) maker.
The company in November posted a third, straight quarter of profit growth as its Motorola business broke even operationally and as its data centre unit posted much-reduced losses of US$3 million, allowing it to say it was on track to be a “sustainable, profitable growth engine”.
Chairman and chief executive Yang Yuanqing believes the worst is over for Lenovo, which has spent the past few years refocusing on mobile and smart devices, as well as its data centre services, in what the company has called an “intelligent transformation” to capitalise on the rapid growth of the internet of things (IoT) market globally, as well as the wider adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
“Because of the past few years of laying the groundwork … we have all the assets needed to now push ahead in the field of automation [where processes can be conducted with minimal human inputs],” he said in a recent interview.
These assets, according to Yang, include the capacity to handle big data and powerful algorithms that can parse the information – generating applications for the medical, manufacturing and retail industries among others. These assets have been developed during the company’s long-haul transformation from a plain vanilla distributor of foreign PC brands in China, to a manufacturer, to expanding overseas via the acquisition of IBM’s PC business in 2005.
