Lenovo to move away from Chinese market

Lenovo to move away from Chinese market

Staff Reporter

2014-05-31

Wong Wai-Ming, CFO of Lenovo Group, said that the company plans to refocus its business on the international arena instead of China, reports the official website of the China’s nationalistic Global Times. China, Wong said, is no longer the most profitable market for Lenovo, according to the report.

China used to occupy up to 60%-70% of Lenovo’s revenue, yet this figure has sloped dramatically. China currently still creates 38% of Lenovo’s revenue, but the huge growth potential in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North and South America appear far more appealing, with estimated growth at about 30% in revenue. China, in comparison, has only 1.3% growth of revenue. Statistics suggest that despite the huge profit in China, it has already declined 10% compared with the same time last year, reported Moneycontrol, an Indian financial news website on May 26.

Though Lenovo has surpassed Hewlett-Packard Development Company (HP) as the largest detailer of personal computers (PC), Lenovo’s strategic focus has turned from the shrinking PC market to tablet PCs and smartphones. The company aims to see sales of 1 billion units in 2015 as the third largest smartphone seller, Wang said.

Samsung is the second largest smartphone manufacture in China, however the market in China has already matured. “We still have a long way to go to be top in smartphone sales in China. The difficulty does not lies in profitability, but the quantity of profit,” said Wang.

Compared with the fourth quarter of 2013, the freight volume for smartphones in the first quarter of 2014 declined 2%. This resulted from fierce competition in the market, especially with many new companies pouring in during previous quarters, said Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo. Yang once said that China is “the fiercest smartphone market in the world.”

The expansion of the smartphone market beyond China will lead to inevitable encounters with Samsung and Apple. With a huge market, Lenovo can find a place in mainstream products as well as new markets, garnering growth of 20%-30%.

On January 29 Lenovo acquired Motorola from Google with US$29.1 billion. That was not Lenovo’s first acquisition. It acquired IBM PC in December 2014 with US$ 1.25 billion, and on January 23, 2014 Lenovo acquired IBM’s Intel based server lines for US$23 billion. The acquisition of Motorola will help Lenovo’s international ambitions given Motorola’s close connection with operators and distributors.

At the end of 2013, the annual sales of Lenovo smartphones rose 29%, totaling 50 million units, about the same number of units as its PCs. The sale units for tablet PCs were 9.2 million.

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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