Chips By Lee Mathews Feb. 7, 2014 9:00 am
What’s going on with Google and Lenovo? Barely a week has passed since the Chinese PC manufacturing titan bought Motorola, and already Google has returned the favor by purchasing a 5.94% stake in Lenovo.
The deal will reportedly set Google back around $750 million — or roughly a quarter of what Lenovo paid for Motorola. So while Google no longer seems to have any interest in developing handsets in-house, clearly they want to do more than provide guidance for the Nexus program and lay out specs for would-be Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.
They may also want to help Lenovo further their enterprise ambitions. Don’t forget, in addition to Motorola Lenovo just picked IBM’s server hardware business for another $2.3 billion. Lenovo was already the largest PC company in the world (thanks in part to another purchase from IBM several years ago), but their share of the server market remained fairly minute.
With an estimated 15% share after that deal and Motorola now in the fold, Lenovo has moved swiftly and decisively to diversify revenue streams. The PC market has remained soft, and bolstering business with high-margin server sales and an increased presence in the white-hot smartphone and tablet market should help Lenovo’s bottom line.
Their next move on the mobile front might involve becoming a bit more like Samsung. Reuters is reporting that IBM may be pondering the sale of its semiconductor business. Based on IBM and Lenovo’s past dealings, Lenovo’s mobile ambitions, and the fact that Google is now involved — well, it may not be long before Lenovo has its own chip design division.
Controlling as much of the development and manufacturing as possible has worked nicely for Apple and Samsung, so perhaps Lenovo thinks it’s time to follow their example. This is a determined company with a lot of clout, and also one with global ambitions. With Google’s involvement, Lenovo may just have the help they need to become a force to be reckoned with in every kind of computing market — mobile, desktop, enterprise, and embedded systems.
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The deal will reportedly set Google back around $750 million — or roughly a quarter of what Lenovo paid for Motorola. So while Google no longer seems to have any interest in developing handsets in-house, clearly they want to do more than provide guidance for the Nexus program and lay out specs for would-be Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.
They may also want to help Lenovo further their enterprise ambitions. Don’t forget, in addition to Motorola Lenovo just picked IBM’s server hardware business for another $2.3 billion. Lenovo was already the largest PC company in the world (thanks in part to another purchase from IBM several years ago), but their share of the server market remained fairly minute.
With an estimated 15% share after that deal and Motorola now in the fold, Lenovo has moved swiftly and decisively to diversify revenue streams. The PC market has remained soft, and bolstering business with high-margin server sales and an increased presence in the white-hot smartphone and tablet market should help Lenovo’s bottom line.
Their next move on the mobile front might involve becoming a bit more like Samsung. Reuters is reporting that IBM may be pondering the sale of its semiconductor business. Based on IBM and Lenovo’s past dealings, Lenovo’s mobile ambitions, and the fact that Google is now involved — well, it may not be long before Lenovo has its own chip design division.
Controlling as much of the development and manufacturing as possible has worked nicely for Apple and Samsung, so perhaps Lenovo thinks it’s time to follow their example. This is a determined company with a lot of clout, and also one with global ambitions. With Google’s involvement, Lenovo may just have the help they need to become a force to be reckoned with in every kind of computing market — mobile, desktop, enterprise, and embedded systems.
More...
