Yes, that’s how globally ambitious product placement executives at Lenovo Group have become. Having transformed Lenovo into the largest PC brand in China, its top brass is all geared up to turn the company into a global brand, at a time when some of the most established names in personal computing struggle to grow their market positions as consumers tighten their belts.

Lenovo just wrapped up a solid 2Q with numbers that beat consensus forecasts. For the quarter to September, PC shipments grew 35.8% y-o-y, seven times the average growth rate of the global PC industry. That makes Lenovo the fastest-growing PC brand in the world currently and catapults it to the second place worldwide, beating Dell (see table).

 

True, not all Lenovo’s growth was organic, especially given that PC demand has been slackening as consumer confidence ebbs across the world. A key propeller for its strong 2Q numbers came from its recent acquisition of German PC maker Medion and its JV with NEC Corporation of Japan. That gave Hong Kong-listed Lenovo significant market share gains in Japan and Western Europe in a short space of time.

 

It’s a very similar story to that of another Asian PC brand — Taiwan’s Acer Inc. In 2007, Acer snapped up PC companies Gateway and Packard Bell, enlarging its footprint in the US and European markets almost overnight. By 2009, Acer had overtaken Dell to claim the No 2 spot in PC shipments worldwide. Backed by a line of affordably priced laptops, it began gunning to unseat top PC vendor HP in global laptop shipments.