Lenovo to swallow German PC giant
Largest deal since IBM PC biz borging
Chinese PC maker Lenovo has agreed to acquire German consumer electronics and PC manufacturer Medion in a move that it says will double its market share in Germany, making it the third-largest PC company in that country.
"This agreement represents another bold move for Lenovo to realize its long-term strategy," said Lenovo chief executive Yang Yuanqing in a statement announcing the deal. "It will complement both Lenovo's core PC business and new businesses which are key areas for development."
The €629.4m ($920m) deal will be Lenovo's largest since its $1.75bn acquisition of IBM's PC business in 2005 – although that deal would now be worth over $2bn in 2001 dollars, making the Medion buy less than half the size of that 2005 blockbuster.
Still, at nearly $1bn, the Medion acquisition is not what anyone would call small potatoes.
According to Lenovo, the deal will result in the combined company controlling over 14 per cent of the German PC market, and having a Western European PC market share of about 7.4 per cent.
Lenovo is growing fast. According to the company – which last week announced 2010-2011 revenues of over $21BN – it is "delivering growth in every region, every segment and every product line." During that period, they report, the company grew 28.2 per cent while the worldwide PC market grew 7.4 per cent.
In "the near term", Lenovo reports, both companies will maintain their individual product brands, sales and support channels, customer service, product delivery, and warranty services. It will be "business as usual" after the acquisition, they claim.
The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year. ®
COMMENTS
German manufacturer
Medion is certainly no German manufacturer. It is an assembler who puts together stock standard chinese parts and sticks either a Medion or some other label on it (Medion is also assembling low-end consumer PCs for other brands). Often they approach the asian component manufacturers and have them build spec'd down OEM components for them. For example, to build Nvidia cards with a low end GPU but with a card ID that to the clueless customer look like something great (Medion's sales concept is to offer paper specs which look great but which are not much better than any other low-end consumer PC, together with a shitload of software that for most part is either limited or simply useless (or both).
The last real German PC manufacturer was Fujitsu-Siemens who actually manufactured mainboards and complete PCs in Germany. However, this was only for their business line of PCs, most of their consumer crap (Amilo etc) was made by Medion and other OEMs.
Don't know how much changed since Siemens left the company, though.
"mirror the mainboard"
I presume that you mean that the PCI cards appear on the 'wrong' end of the board, and also that the case opens on the 'wrong' side. Chances are these were systems with BTX (as opposed to ATX-type) motherboards, that were supposed to mark a new integration of board and case design to allow better cooling. It was an Intel specification. Gateway and Dell produced several systems using them.
Absolute bugger to try and find a replacement, because nobody makes them any more.
Happy with mine
FWIW, I'm quite happy with my Medion PC. I would never have given it a second thought, except that one sunday afternoon Murphy struck at the worst possible time, and I needed a replacement NOW. Ran to my local Aldi just before closing time, and godt what seemed a good deal.
In what must now be about three years, I've been somewhat surprised to tell friends and colleagues "it just worked, and it keeps on just working". I consider myself a professional user (programmer), and I do a bit of gaming too.
Granted, I immediately replaced the keyboard and the mouse with the somewhat better versions I had sitting around.
Aldi
Two of my relatives have bought Medion computers in Aldi. In my limited experience, they tend to have fairly impressive specifications combined with disappointing build quality and components (e.g. keyboards, screens). Will Lenovo take them upmarket, in terms of quality if not price?
At least they're honest....
"making it the third-largest PC company in that country."
I can't understand outfits that proudly announce "with this acquisition, we'll be amongst the top 7 companies in the business".
i.e., 7th.
