Lenovo Now World’s Number 3 PC Maker, With Stronger Growth Than Apple

A close-up of the lid of the Lenovo IdeaPad Z370 laptop.

Chinese hardware maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) has moved up into third place in terms of global market share of PC shipments, with world-beating annual growth to match. The new stats from iSuppli (see the table below) this week show preliminary Q2 2011 data, and highlight Lenovo’s move up one rank from the previous quarter.

This is Lenovo’s highest ever-ranking, taking it up to the late-IBM heydays of over half a decade ago. Its year-on-year growth of 23 percent beat even Apple’s rate of acceleration (13.6 percent). The Chinese firm shipped 25.6 percent more PCs than the previous quarter. iSuppli’s Matthew Wilkins said:

Beyond the continuing strength in its home market of China – where both the economy and PC demand continued to expand vigorously — Lenovo’s performance in the second quarter was boosted by rising sales in other regions. These regions included the broader Asia-Pacific area, as well as the United States, with Lenovo performing well in those places because of demand from the enterprise segment.

Here are the new figures, which we took the liberty of putting into a prettier table:

Not shown on the table is another Chinese PC vendor, Haier (HKG:1169), which reportedly saw a recent, rapid rate of growth. Samsung (SEO:005930) secured the strongest surge in shipments this quarter, up 31.3 percent.

The WSJ reported last week that Lenovo had hired Acer’s (TPE:2353) former CEO, Gianfranco Lanci, as an advisor, in a bid to strengthen its consumer hardware (and hopefully style and design, too).

Asus Up, Acer Down; PCs Not Dead

Speaking of Acer… There were wildly contrasting fortunes for the two Taiwanese contenders. Acer was down 4 percent this quarter; sliding 20 percent over the previous year. Asus (TPE:2357), meanwhile, entered the global top five for the first time.

In other news, the PC industry is not dead, despite a very shaky start to the year. Of course, all the global top eight have tablet products – oh, wait… except for HP – as a back-up in case the bottom falls out of the already margins-squeezed consumer computer market. Lenovo’s own is the IdeaPad, which doesn’t look to be the killer Android slate that some people have been waiting for.

HP (NYSE:HPQ) managed to eek out a small amount of growth – an amusing extra three PCs this quarter! It’s still not clear if the American giant plans to sell off its PC division – which is why last month we looked at five Chinese hardware makers that might want to buy it up.