Lenovo Raises PC Shipments Outlook for 2025 After Strong Earnings

Lenovo Group Ltd. hiked its projection for global PC shipments in 2025 after posting better-than-expected earnings, saying AI features will help boost growth next year.

The overall PC market will expand in the current quarter, Lenovo's Chief Executive Officer Yang Yuanqing told Bloomberg News after earnings on Friday. He raised his outlook for global shipments in 2025 to double-digit percentage growth, up from a previous forecast of five percent to 10 percent, citing demand for AI PCs and the replacement cycle facilitated by Windows 11. 

Yang added that Lenovo is not particularly disadvantaged against its key competitors if US President-elect Donald Trump decides to slap tariffs on foreign goods after formally returning to the White House. 

Net income grew 44 percent to $358.5 million (roughly Rs. 3,027 crore) in the September quarter, Beijing-based Lenovo said in a filing on Friday. That compares with an average estimate of $343.3 million (roughly Rs. 2,899 crore). Revenue rose 24 percent to $17.85 billion (roughly Rs. 1,50,738 crore), also exceeding analyst projections. 

The company's quarterly PC shipments climbed three percent from a year ago, according to industry researcher IDC, while rivals like Dell Technologies Inc. and Apple Inc. saw declines. “The market is taking a breather before going into the year-end buying period,” said Bryan Ma, vice president at IDC.

PC makers are making a big push this year to add artificial intelligence capabilities — with a helping hand from Windows maker Microsoft Corp. — in a bid to entice consumers into an upgrade cycle. As the industry bounces back from the troughs of recent years, the reception to this new crop of AI PCs will be crucial to future success. The mass market's interest for such devices, which have higher price tags, still remains to be tested. 

Lenovo's AI bet is not limited to end-user devices. The company's infrastructure solutions group, which sells servers to large-scale customers, is another key pillar of its investment into the nascent technology. Lenovo sees that division powering growth by delivering data center hardware that helps accelerate AI model training and computations. 

“Lenovo's data center segment could grow substantially on AI server order wins and improving supply of Nvidia's GPUs, though profitability may remain subdued”, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Steven Tseng and Sean Chen wrote in a report ahead of the earnings release.

© 2024 Bloomberg L.P.

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