Lenovo now leads most of world's top markets

Lenovo Group Ltd, the world's largest PC maker by shipments, now leads five of the world's top seven PC markets, after adding Russia and Germany to its list, the company said on Thursday. Reporting record high quarterly sales of $8.7 billion, an 11 percent increase year-on-year, China's largest PC company also turned in a record pre-tax profit of $204 million in the three months to September. Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo chairman and chief executive officer, said the company will place a greater emphasis next year on making profits "rather than grabbing more market share", and aim to lift its pre-tax profit margin by at least one percentage point in three years' time. Lenovo overtook HP in the third quarter to become the largest seller of personal computers measured by shipments, the IT research company company Gartner Inc said last month. Until the third quarter, HP had held the leading position since 2006. However, in seven large PC markets worldwide, the Chinese company said it now has five first places: at home in China, Japan, India, Russia and Germany. Lenovo was ranked a lowly 14th and held only a 0.7 percent market share in Russia, for instance, in 2008, but now its market share there has increased to 14.1 percent, making it the dominant player. Yang said that Lenovo, now the world's largest PC maker, is looking to expand its tablet PCs and smartphone businesses too. During the second quarter, Lenovo's worldwide PC shipments grew 10.3 percent and achieved the company's highest-ever worldwide market share of 15.6 percent. For the whole of fiscal 2011, Lenovo said it had $29.6 billion in sales, and had commanded 12.9 percent of the global market as the second-largest PC maker. Sales increased by 20 percent year-on-year in China in the same period, and sales in the Chinese market reached $3.9 billion, accounting for 44 percent of the company's worldwide sales. In China, Lenovo had a 34 percent share of the PC market, up 2.4 percentage points year-on-year, and shipments increased 8 percent year-on-year during the quarter. Its figures also reveal it sold about 8.6 million phones, of which a third were sold in overseas markets. Of those, 7 million units were smartphones and the company now holds about 11.4 percent of the Chinese smartphone market, according to the US-based IT research company International Data Corp. Wang Jiping, a senior analyst at IDC Asia-Pacific, said: "Mobile Internet products sold fast in China in the first three quarters of this year. Annual smartphone shipments grew 143.2 percent compared with last year." Mobile Internet product sales in the quarter accounted for about 18 percent of Lenovo's domestic sales revenue, and grew 1.7 times compared with last year, to $676 million, said the company. Sales also increased 27 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which contributed about 21 percent of Lenovo's global revenues. Yang said the company will continue to make acquisitions to boost its growth in global markets, after buying Brazilian electronics maker CCE for $148 million, and US cloud computing firm Stoneware Inc this year.