The third quarter has ended, and market research agencies have successively released PC company shipment data. The data given by IDC shows that Lenovo is still the world’s largest PC leader, but its lead over HP has been weakened. HP has surpassed Lenovo in terms of growth rate. It means that Lenovo needs to work harder to defend the position of the boss.

Data from IDC shows that in the third quarter of this year, Lenovo ranked first in the PC industry with a market share of 24.6%, with a year-on-year growth rate of 7.1%. HP’s market share was 23.8%, with a year-on-year growth rate of 9.3%.

Compared with the market share of 25.1% in the previous quarter, Lenovo’s market share fell slightly by 0.5 percentage points; HP’s market share increased by 0.1 percentage points from 23.7% in the previous quarter. Clearly, the market share gap between Lenovo and HP is narrowing.

Lenovo’s lead in the PC market has been weakened by a variety of factors. Previously, US media reported that Intel’s CPU was affected by the process conversion from 14nm FinFET to 10nm process, resulting in insufficient production capacity. It gave priority to supplying CPUs to American PC companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Lenovo’s CPU supply was insufficient, and it was forced to increase its supply to AMD. For CPU purchases, the first quarter data released by market research agency TradForce indicated that AMD’s CPUs accounted for 30% of Lenovo’s CPU purchases.

AMD’s CPUs are relatively cost-effective, and the Zen architecture it developed in the past two years has performed well, helping it continue to seize market share in the PC market. However, AMD’s CPUs are not as ideal in terms of power consumption control, especially for notebook products. The low-power CPUs of 2019 are inferior to Intel in terms of power consumption control, resulting in Lenovo’s decline in the notebook market, while HP’s growth in the notebook market has affected Lenovo’s performance in the PC market.

Lenovo surpassed HP in the third quarter of last year and regained its position as the global PC leader. In addition to its own structural adjustment, the main reason was the successful acquisition of Fujitsu and thus achieved the overtake of HP. This approach of Lenovo is similar to the strategy of winning the leadership of the PC industry by acquiring the PC business of companies such as IBM many years ago. However, after Lenovo successfully merged with Fujitsu, it has to rely on internal strength to maintain its leading position in the PC market. The data reminds Lenovo that it needs some hard work on endogenous growth.

After HP split in 2015, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is in charge of the PC business, seems to be rejuvenated, and PC shipments continued to grow, surpassing Lenovo to take the PC No. 1 position in the first quarter of 2017, and then it maintained this position for six consecutive quarters. Position, after Lenovo overtaken HP through the acquisition of Fujitsu in the third quarter of last year, HP continued to maintain the momentum of steady growth, showing that the company has strong resilience.

Lenovo’s largest market is the Chinese market. In 2008, Lenovo’s successful turnaround mainly depended on the domestic market. This shows the importance of the domestic market, which is being eroded by Huawei and Xiaomi. Both Huawei and Xiaomi launched PC products in 2016. Although these two companies have not entered the top five in the world, they still caused some trouble for Lenovo in the domestic market, forcing Lenovo to spend more energy in the domestic market. It also doesn’t help it compete with HP in the global market.

For Lenovo, there is no doubt about the importance of the PC business, which is its largest source of income. In the smartphone market, the dawn of revival has not been seen for a long time. In the server market, it is facing the attack of the wave and Huawei. The PC business If it is overtaken by HP again, it will be a huge blow to it. It has to think about its current deficiencies in order to change the current dilemma of being closely pursued by HP.