Lenovo Group Ltd. said it wants to double its share of the market for storage equipment and servers running corporate networks within three years and is open to using an acquisition to achieve that.
The second-biggest maker of personal computers plans to expand its share of the server business to between 5 percent and 10 percent during that time, from 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter, Chief Executive Officer Yang Yuanqing said in an interview Friday in Chengdu, China.
“Today’s market share is too small,” Yang said. “If we can get a good acquisition,probably we could speed up the process.”
Lenovo diversified into smart phones, tablets and home entertainment to help weather a global slump in demand for PCs. That helped the company report a 90 percent jump in profit in the three months ended March even as global PC shipments fell about 14 percent amid a consumer shift to mobile devices from Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.
The company last year allied itself with EMC Corp. to boost sales of storage equipment. Talks with International Business Machines Corp. for Lenovo to buy parts of the Armonk, N.Y.-based company’s server division broke down after the two sides couldn’t agree on a price, a person familiar with the discussions said May 3.
Yang, who is attending the Fortune Global Forum, declined to comment on whether the company held talks with IBM.
Lenovo has headquarters in Beijing and Morrisville, N.C.
Business, Pages 25 on 06/10/2013