Lenovo Group (聯想), the world’s fourth-biggest personal computer maker, reported its second straight quarterly profit yesterday as a 33 percent rise in sales drove its recovery from the global downturn.
Profit for the three months ending Dec. 31 was US$80 million, or US$0.86 per share, compared with a US$97 million loss for the same period in 2008, said Lenovo, based in Beijing and Morrisville, Carolina. Global sales rose to US$4.8 billion.
HIT HARD
Lenovo was hit hard by the global economic crisis, which prompted its corporate customers to slash purchases. The company suffered three losing quarters before rebounding to earn US$53 million in the three months ending Sept. 30.
The company, which acquired IBM Corp’s personal computer (PC) unit in 2005, said its global market share expanded to 9 percent, its highest to date.
“We have achieved our highest-ever global market share for the third straight quarter and notably increased profitability,” chief executive officer Yang Yuanqing (楊元慶) said in a statement. “These achievements demonstrated the effectiveness of the strategies we mapped out at the beginning of the year.”
EXPANSION PLANS
Yang said Lenovo plans to expand in mobile Internet after launching a netbook and a smartphone last month. The company paid US$200 million in November to buy back mobile phone assets that it sold earlier to focus on PCs.
“In the future, while we continue to expand our PC business, we also want to attack the mobile Internet category to drive growth and capitalize [on] our innovation efforts,” Yang said.
Quarterly sales in Lenovo’s home China market soared 45 percent from a year earlier to US$2.3 billion, accounting for 47 percent of the company’s worldwide total.
The company said its China market share rose 2.8 percentage points to 33.5 percent despite competition from industry leaders Dell Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co, which are trying to expand sales to both prosperous cities and the poorer countryside.
In mature markets such as the US and Western Europe, sales rose 13 percent from a year earlier to US$1.7 billion, the company said. In India and other emerging markets, sales rose 52 percent to US$857 million.
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