Lenovo’s profits climb 30% on strong PC shipments (but don’t tell HP)

HP’s days as the world’s largest PC maker may be numbered.

Lenovo’s share of the PC market has been in a non-stop climb over the past few years, and its latest quarter has pushed it closer to the No. 1 spot.

This jump had some welcome effects on Lenovo’s bottom line: The company reported that profits jumped 30 percent to $141.1 million during the first quarter, slightly edging analyst estimates.

Much of this success came from a 24 percent jump in PC shipments. This is big because it shows that Lenovo’s PC sales are growing even as the larger PC market goes through a slump.

Lenovo’s first quarter revenue climbed 24 percent to $8.01 billion, nearly half of which came from China alone. As Lenovo’s biggest market and home turf, China is a key area for Lenovo, and for good reason: Lenovo wants to grow, and there’s no better way to do that than by targeting a country with a tiny PC penetration rate.

Elsewhere, Lenovo’s sales were similarly rosy: Sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa rose to $1.58 billion, and sales in the U.S. climbed 6.8 precent to $1.18 billion

And Lenovo’s success may have made it a bit cocky. When asked whether Lenovo was concerned by Microsoft’s jump into the PC hardware space, Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said the software giant was no different from the likes of HP.

“We are still confident that we are providing much better hardware than our competitors, including Microsoft,” Yang said.