Lenovo's NZ revenue jumps

Lenovo's New Zealand operation saw its revenue jump 13 per cent to $91.3 million in the year to March 31, according to accounts just filed.

The Chinese tech giant has two major lines of business: the laptop operation it bought from IBM - including the ThinkPad brand - and the Motorola handset business it bought from Google in 2014 (Google having picked it up in the 2011 Motorola carve-up).

Locally, laptops accounted for the most revenue in FY2019 ($52.7m), followed by desktop PCs ($13.6m) and Chromebooks - or low-price notebooks that run on Google's Chrome rather than Microsoft Windows ($4.4m).

Lenovo NZ's expenses were dominated by related-party payments to its Chinese parent and other affiliates. Net profit fell from the prior-year $1.5m to $188,000, pinned on a higher cost-of-sales, in part because of adverse currency shifts.

After its buoyant FY2019 result - in revenue terms - the company could be in for a big Christmas and New Year, with several marquee products in the works, including a foldable screen laptop, the first laptop with built-in 5G and a reboot of the iconic Razr flip-phone - which, for a brief time in 2007 ruled the smartphone world before the iPhone and Android steamrolled in (the new Razr is due to be unveiled at an event in New York tomorrow).

The PC market remains a hard-scrabble affair.

PC shipments into the NZ market dropped 4.7 per cent to 690,435 in the year to June, IDC analyst Liam Landon said.

But Lenovo got a larger share of the pie, growing its market share to 12 per cent, putting it third ahead of Apple (12 per cent) and Dell (7 per cent) and behind HP (40 per cent) and Acer (15 per cent).

Lenovo Australia-NZ managing director Matt Codrington told the Herald: "Despite a declining New Zealand PC market, Lenovo has been experiencing a strong 5 per cent year-on-year market share growth for FY2019."

Codrington put the increase down to Lenovo putting more bodies on the ground in NZ, plus strength in the hybrid or detachable-screen laptops - a fast-growing segment in the otherwise falling PC market.

The Lenovo MD is angling for further gains in FY2020 by dint of his company lining up to be the first to release a laptop with built-in 5G.

Levovo's 5G connectivity will come courtesy of Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modem, which featured in Vodafone's early 5G testing.

That means a laptop with fibre-like speed and not dependent on Wi-Fi - at least not in areas with 5G, which is set for launch here - possibly before Christmas.

On the smartphone side of things, Lenovo has a full suite of Motorola touchscreen Android handsets on the NZ market under the "Moto" brand.

More will be unveiled at the official US event tomorrow, but leaked images indicate that like the horizontally foldable models from Samsung and Huawei, the new vertically folding new Razr will eschew the physical keyboard of its original model for a second touchscreen.

Lenovo is also one of four PC makers (the others are Dell, HP and Asus) set to release a dual-screen laptop running on Microsoft's Windows 10x around autumn next year.

Some glitches with the first-round of foldable-screen phones notwithstanding, these notebooks look promising in prototype form. There's a traditional display, plus a second display where a physical keyboard usually sits. The second display (see video below) can be used as a virtual keyboard, a touchscreen or an expanded display.