Lenovo Group Ltd, the world's third-biggest personal computer maker, is seeing little impact on its business from a slowdown in the United States as companies look to boost productivity, its chief executive said.
-- Aims for greater consumer penetration from early 2008
-- Open to an acquisition in Europe
"When these tendencies start to happen in a market, the space that gets hit the most is the consumer space," William Amelio told Reuters in an interview.
"Our participation right now in consumer is lot less than others, therefore, lesser the hit," he said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum summit in New Delhi.
"Additionally, large enterprise, which is the big portion of our business, is going through major restructuring right now.
"They will continue to do that because they need to continue to work on productivity. Unless there is a disaster we walk into, people will not miss those plans on IT because they give a big productivity boost," Amelio said.
Businesses represent about 70 percent of the PC market for Lenovo, but consumers, which account for the rest, are the fastest-growing segment and Amelio said the company would start making greater penetration into this market from the first quarter of 2008.
Initially, Lenovo, China's top computer maker, will focus on boosting its consumer business in the United States, France and South Africa, he said.
"We have a very small share outside China in the consumer space and inside China we have 30 percent share."
Amelio, who worked for Dell Inc, NCR Corp and Honeywell International Inc before joining Lenovo, said the company's business in Europe and emerging markets like China and India was growing at a robust pace.
"Of course, China, India, Brazil and Russia are the major emerging markets that we are highly interested in. But there are others as well, some other eastern European countries that we are focusing our attention on. Turkey is an interesting market and Mexico of course," he said.
"Our growth in the emerging markets tends to be higher than the growth in the mature markets as you would expect." Lenovo said last month its latest quarterly earnings nearly tripled. It had 8.2 percent of the total PC market, followed closely by consumer-focused Acer Inc of Taiwan at 8.1 percent.
But while Lenovo retained its lead over Acer in the third quarter, analysts say Acer may have leap-frogged Lenovo with its purchase of Gateway Inc in October. Both companies trail Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell.
Amelio said Lenovo was open to an acquisition in Europe to boost its business there, without elaborating. Lenovo said in August it was in exclusive talks to take over Packard Bell BV to spearhead a consumer expansion, allowing it to quickly grab market share and expand its relatively weak presence in Europe.
But those plans were dealt a blow when Gateway later said it would exercise a right of first refusal to buy Packard Bell in a deal that would unseat Lenovo as the world's No 3 PC maker.
Lenovo, which is still in the process of integrating an ailing global arm it bought from IBM in 2005, is bullish about its business in India and sees good demand from small and mid-sized enterprises as well as from consumers.
Computer sales in India rose 20.6 percent in the year ended in March 2007, with Hewlett grabbing 21.2 percent of the market followed by HCL with 13.5 percent and Lenovo at 9.5 percent, according to industry body IDC.