Lenovo resumes year-on-year revenue growth – performance driven by resilience of core businesses and effectiveness of transformation

HONG KONG — (BUSINESS WIRE) — February 21, 2024 — Lenovo Group Limited (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY), together with its subsidiaries (‘the Group’), today announced third quarter results reporting Group revenue increasing 3% year-on-year to US$15.7 billion, and Group profitability improving quarter-to-quarter for the second time in a row. Net income was US$357 million on a non-Hong Kong Financial Reporting Standards (non-HKFRS)^[1] basis, with net income margin up 0.4% quarter-to-quarter to 2.3%. The Group’s diversified growth engines continued to deliver strong performance, with revenue from non-PC businesses accounting for 42% of Group revenue, up 1.3 points year-on-year.

The consistent quarter-to-quarter improvements over past quarters have been driven by the resilience of the Group’s core businesses and the wider effectiveness of its ongoing transformation. The SSG business hit an important milestone of passing the US$2 billion revenue threshold, achieved a record high operating profit with operating margin of over 20% and grew revenue from managed services and project and solution services year-on-year for 11 straight quarters. The ISG business delivered quarter-to-quarter revenue growth and reached a record high US$1 billion revenue for its storage, software, and services businesses. Overall, the IDG business resumed revenue growth, outperformed the market and achieved year-on-year shipment growth for PCs, and maintained its industry-leading profitability.

Financial Highlights:

Chairman and CEO quote – Yuanqing Yang:

“Last quarter, we delivered on our promise and resumed year-on-year revenue growth, driven by both the resilience of our core businesses and the effectiveness of the service-led transformation. Looking ahead, our commitment to AI innovation, our pocket-to-cloud computing capabilities, full stack portfolio of smart devices, smart infrastructure, smart solutions and services, combined with our partnerships with other key leaders in AI, will ensure that we are well-positioned to capture the tremendous opportunities in AI.”

Accelerating AI leadership

The Group is capitalizing on the significant growth opportunities afforded by the AI-era. In particular, the emerging trend of hybrid AI is directly driving the demand for AI PCs, a trend that will stimulate another industry refresh cycle as users require devices designed for more creativity and productivity. Alongside devices, hybrid AI is driving increased demand for hybrid infrastructure and customer demand for AI-native applications, solutions and services such as advisory, design, development and maintenance – fueling growth across multiple customer verticals.

To further build its unique position in the AI-era, Lenovo is continuing its investment commitments in innovation. R&D headcount is up year-to-year at more than 25% of Group headcount, with R&D expenses-to-revenue ratio for the full fiscal year on track to hit an all-time high. This ongoing investment, together with a full portfolio of AI-enabled, AI-ready, and AI-optimized devices, infrastructure, solutions and services, is the foundation of Lenovo’s vision of ‘AI for All’ - changing the way individuals and enterprises live and work and will fuel future sustainable growth for the Group.

Recent AI announcements from the Group include a partnership with Anaconda to accelerate AI development and deployment of Lenovo’s high-performance data science workstations, a suite of AI-powered devices and solutions announced at the annual CES show, an expansion of its hybrid cloud platform for AI with new ThinkAgile hyperconverged solutions and ThinkSystem servers, and a newly launched cyber-resiliency as a service (CRaaS) offering.

Solutions and Services Group (SSG): Record revenue, record operating profit, driving AI solutions

Q3 FY23/24 performance:

• Record revenue of US$2.0 billion, with double digit year-on-year growth. Record high operating profit with operating margin of over 20%.
• Protected support services and software as the core profit engines for SSG.
• Further expanded managed services and project and solutions services, together now making up 55% of SSG’s revenue, up 1.5 points year-on-year and growing consecutively year-on-year for 11 straight quarters.

Opportunities and Sustainable Growth:

• SSG has strong momentum for its hero offerings, including Digital Workplace Solutions (DWS), Hybrid Cloud, and sustainability solutions and services.
• SSG focused its hero offerings to support specific vertical industries with smart solutions, winning major customer deals.
• Increasing customer demand of AI technology used in industry use cases - with accompanying services such as advisory, design, and deployment - fueling AI services growth across different verticals.