As the PC market starts to rebound from deep declines PC giant Lenovo is set to crank up their presence in the Australian consumer market a move that could see Motorola smartphones relaunched along with some of the best PC products revealed at the annual CES Show in Las Vegas.
The entry of Lenovo into the mainstream consumer PC market is set to put pressure on brands that include Toshiba, Dell who is currently pulling out of retail store sales, and Hewlett Packard (HP).
The Company that is planning a series of major announcements will later this month hold a press conference to announce which of their consumer range will be launched in Australia. It’s also tipped that the Company could announce their plans for Motorola – a US mobile brand that was acquired by Lenovo last year from Google.
Matt Codrington, the CEO of Lenovo Australia is refusing to talk about his consumer business plans at this stage.
ChannelNews understands that the Chinese Company who are the #1 PC Company in the world has cut an exclusive reseller deal with JB Hi Fi. During the past six months JB Hi Fi has been exclusively selling Lenovo tablets, now the retailer is looking to expand their PC range with the inclusion of several new Lenovo PC products.
The new range is believed to include a brand new hybrid notebook that doubles as a notebook and tablet.
The current model Lenovo Yoga 2 11 has an Intel Pentium processor, 4GB of memory, two USB ports (one of them USB 3.0) a micro HDMI port, an SD Card slot, 720p webcam, an audio jack and a proprietary power port. It also has a 500GB drive as standard, but it can be supplemented with an SSD option.
It also has an 11.6-inch, 1366-by-768 pixel touchscreen that can flip 360 degrees for effectively four display modes: notebook, tablet, tent and stand.
The device is selling in the USA for sub $500.
In Q2 2014, the worldwide PC market experienced 14 percent growth year-over-year to 123.9 million units, if you take into consideration desktops, notebooks, and tablets. Notebook sales saw a slight resurgence in Q2 2014, with shipments all but flat in the same quarter a year ago.
The new Canalys research shows that notebook shipments surpassed those of tablets (the last time this was the case was less than a year ago in Q3 2013).
Canalys, an independent analyst firm claims the PC market saw “effectively no sequential growth.” They concluded that the positive effect tablets have had on overall PC shipments is beginning to wear off.
If laptop shipments were “all but flat” but surpassed tablets again, then there’s only one explanation: tablet shipments fell approximately 5 percent.
This was largely due to both Apple and Samsung suffering shipment declines (Apple’s was steeper than Samsung’s), Apple accounts for 46 percent of global tablet shipments.
