Windows 8 pays off big time in Lenovo’s latest quarter

If the PC market is shrinking, Lenovo so far appears to be immune to the trend.

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The Chinese electronics company sold 14.1 million PCs last quarter, thanks largely to its continuing success in China and other emerging markets.

In fact, this is the fifteenth straight quarter where Lenovo’s PC business grew even as the greater PC market has shrunk. That feat helped Lenovo report a gross profit of $205 million on $9.4 billion in revenue. Not bad for a company that conventional wisdom says should be floundering.

Lenovo’s sparkling results stand in contrast to the resentment-soaked PC shipment numbers that Acer reported this week. While Windows 8 is working out pretty well for Lenovo, Acer can’t say the same. And it’s pretty bitter about it.

“The whole market didn’t come back to growth after the Windows 8 launch. That’s a simple way to judge if it is successful or not,” Acer president Jim Wong told Bloomberg yesterday.

So how do you explain Lenovo’s success? Pretty simply, really: Its devices don’t stink. In fact, Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga is the best Windows 8 device I’ve used so far. That device, along with the rest of Lenovo’s early Windows 8 PCs, shows that consumers do respond positively when companies create high-quality hardware.

Something tells me Acer is pointing its indignant finger in the wrong direction.