The Lenovo-era for Global PC Market

Since 2012, global PC market has always been in a status of weakness; especially the second quarter ago, global PC market not only suffers shipments doldrums in the successive seven quarters, but also sees the first shipments decline since 2001, according to market research firm Gartner.

However, in the environment of almost all other PC manufacturers declining shipments, Lenovo achieves growth at 10.3%, reaching 16% market shares, becoming world’s largest supplier of PC. Moreover, Lenovo is positively implementing global strategy. The acquisition of Brazil’s largest PC manufacturer CCE further promotes Lenovo’s development in the huge emerging market. Then after experiencing the “IBM Era”, “Apple Era” and “HP Era”, does global PC industry come in to the Lenovo Era”?

Despite the flagging macroeconomic situation, Lenovo, based on the aggressive pricing, gets the inverse development. In particularly, the emerging markets including Brazil and India have huge market potential due to the large population, which is more available to the low-end Lenovo market shares. But personally, I think there is a long way for Lenovo to lead the Lenovo-era in the global PC market.

As we all know, the most important factor helping Lenovo expand market shares comes from the low-price strategy, especially when consumers are faced with various kinds of mobile devices, they are not willing to afford high price to buy Apple notebook, if they can own both Tablet PC and a notebook with the relative lower price. As such, Lenovo holds the advantage in this aspect; furthermore, Chinese market shares contribute the majority to Lenovo’s global 16% market shares. However, with the development of low-price Tablet PC (including Android-based Amazon) and Samsung’s brand effect which will promote its middle-to low-end computer, the competition in Chinese market will become increasingly fierce. As for emerging market, they are also enlarging investment in domestic electronics products; for instance, India with similar domestic conditions to China will be strong rivals of Lenovo, if they create a Lenovo-resembled PC manufacturer; then the advantage of low-price and huge domestic market supporting will not be unique to Lenovo.

In the condition of PC industry slip, to keep the market position, not only should pay attention to expand the emerging market, the technology innovation, especially the revolutionary renewal is the most important factor promoting development, which is relatively lack for Lenovo. So the coming of “Lenovo Era” remains to be seen.