Connect with us

Technology

Lenovo Further Gains Momentum in First Quarter FY 2017/18

Published

on

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

Behind the strength of its 3-wave strategy, Lenovo’s business transformation continued to gain traction during the first quarter, delivering solid profitability in its core PC and smart devices business, and revenue and profit improvements in targeted growth areas, including the data center and mobile businesses.

Fuelled by new investments in people and products, Lenovo’s Data Center Group (DCG) introduced the most comprehensive product lineup in its history, with the new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile portfolio, and continued to build out its end-to-end sales organization. Similarly, Lenovo’s Mobile Business Group launched significant new products led by the Moto Z2 Force, available now on all major U.S. carriers, and ramped up its branding efforts worldwide.

“In the first quarter this fiscal year, we had stable performance as we executed our 3-wave strategy with commitment. We maintained our industry leading profitability in PC, built the foundation in mobile and data centre, and further invested in ‘Device + Cloud’ and ‘Infrastructure + Cloud’ powered by Artificial Intelligence,” said Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Chairman and CEO. “We have made solid progress on every front of our strategy. Particularly MBG continued to improve, and is on track to breakeven by second half of this fiscal year. DCG gained good momentum as well. As the two new growth engines gain speed, we believe the sustainable results will soon follow.”

For its first fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2017, Lenovo’s quarterly revenue was US$10 billion, flat year-over-year, but an increase quarter-to-quarter of 4.5 percent. First quarter pre-tax loss was US$69 million, with a net loss of US$72 million.

Operating profit was up US$110 million quarter-to-quarter. The Company’s gross profit for the first fiscal quarter decreased 11 percent year-over-year to US$1.4 billion, yet remained flat quarter-to-quarter, with gross margin at 13.6 percent. Basic loss per share for the quarter was 0.66 US cents, or 5.15 HK cents.

Lenovo introduced its 3-wave strategy, namely balancing PCSD growth and profit, accelerating our DCG and MBG growth engines, and investing in non-hardware areas, to both meet today’s market dynamics while positioning the Company for longer-term profitable growth. Lenovo is investing in core technology and next-generation platforms that will help customers move towards a smart internet era where all smart devices will be connected to the cloud and powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

While Lenovo is focused on new technologies with our ‘Device + Cloud strategy’, the Lenovo Capital and Investment Group (LCIG), the Company’s provider of IoT solutions, reached a first quarter milestone of over three million users on its Global API platform.

In addition, as Lenovo continued to expand its ecosystem, LenovoID (a unique identification of directly reachable users across Lenovo devices) reached 225 million users in the first quarter. The progress Lenovo is making in its non-hardware businesses, such as software, services, and big data, is already gaining significant traction and winning new customers.

At its third annual Tech World event, held last month in Shanghai, Lenovo demonstrated several new consumer and commercial products, such as SmartVest wearable technology and daystAR glasses to help with industrial maintenance. Lenovo also announced a US$1.2 billion investment in AI research and development, and is pursuing smart solutions and partnerships in the manufacturing, healthcare and transportation sectors.

Business Group Overview

In our PC and Smart Devices (PCSD) business group, which includes PCs, tablets and smart devices, the average selling price of our PC + tablet products improved 7.8 percent year-over-year, meaning that customers were gravitating to Lenovo’s more innovative, higher-end products. Despite industry-wide component shortages and subsequent cost-hike pressures, Lenovo maintained its industry-leading profitability.

PCSD revenue was US$7 billion, with flat growth year-over-year. However, quarter-to-quarter, PCSD revenue grew 4.8 percent. Pre-tax income was US$291 million and pre-tax income margin fell to 4.2 percent, mainly due to the industry-wide increased component costs.

Lenovo’s PC business in the first quarter recorded share gains in Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America, and worldwide shipped 12.4 million units. In China, where Lenovo still enjoys almost 36 percent market share, the Company appointed a strong new consumer-focused leader to run its PCSD business. In North America as well, where the PCSD business has been flat, new leadership is now in place to help boost sales.

Lenovo’s Mobile Business Group (MBG), which includes Moto and Lenovo-branded smartphones, saw encouraging revenue growth outside of China to US$1.7 billion, 7.6 percent increase year-over-year. As an example of the Company’s continuing momentum in this business, Lenovo achieved its publically-stated goal of selling three million Moto Z smartphones within the first 12 months.

For the second consecutive quarter MBG has continued to grow revenue and improve profitability, with revenue up two percent year-over-year to US$1.7 billion and a pre-tax income margin improvement of 2.2 pts. during the same period.

With 11 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter, Lenovo grew 12.3 percent year-over-year outside of China, driven by significant gains in both Western Europe and Latin America, up 137 percent and 56 percent respectively year-over-year.

Lenovo’s Data Center Group (DCG), which includes servers, storage, software and services, continued to focus on the transformative actions that will help drive long-term DCG competitiveness, such as strengthening our sales teams, investing in the channel, revamping our product lines, building our brand strategy, and adding new partnerships.

These actions helped to stabilize the business outside of China in the first quarter with quarter-to-quarter revenue growth of 14 percent. Particularly encouraging was the year-over-year revenue growth in Western Europe and North America of 11 percent and eight percent respectively, including quarter-over-quarter revenue growth of 22 and 19 percent respectively. In both geographies, new leadership, a restructured sales organization, and new products are beginning to pay the expected dividends, and we expect that trend to accelerate into other geographies, including China, as we execute our DCG transformation worldwide.

Another positive sign in DCG was a pre-tax income margin improvement of 1.7 pts. quarter-to-quarter. In addition to these financial indicators, DCG set 42 world-record benchmarks on the new Intel platform, more than any of our competitors and Lenovo continued to be the world’s fastest-growing super-computing provider, number 1 in China and under recent new leadership there, secured a major win with Peking University.

Modupe Gbadeyanka is a fast-rising journalist with Business Post Nigeria. Her passion for journalism is amazing. She is willing to learn more with a view to becoming one of the best pen-pushers in Nigeria. Her role models are the duo of CNN's Richard Quest and Christiane Amanpour.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Technology

WhatsApp Introduces Web Calling, Call Transfer, QuickHD Features

Published

on

WhatsApp Web Calling feature

By Aduragbemi Omiyale

WhatsApp has been updated with a web calling feature, allowing users to now make and receive audio and video calls, both one-on-one and group, directly from WhatsApp Web.

A notice from the Meta-owned messaging platform disclosed that this feature works without the need to download any app.

It was disclosed that this update was made to WhatsApp to make it easier for users to make calls wherever they are and on whatever device, phone or laptop.

Users will have access to features available on their other devices, including screen sharing, reactions, and a dedicated Calls tab with full call history and favourites, all from their browsers.

WhatsApp noted that calls from this feature are end-to-end encrypted, with no time limits and at no cost, as it is the same private experience they expect from the platform.

WhatsApp has also been embedded with easy call transfer, enabling the movement of an active group call from one device to another without hanging up. Users can seamlessly transfer calls to WhatsApp Web or Desktop when they arrive home to collaborate on a larger screen – or vice versa.

The platform further said it now has QuickHD, which allows for an improved video experience at the beginning of a call. With QuickHD, users can now enjoy high-definition video immediately in the very first few seconds of the call.

In addition, it has launched noise suppression to remove the background noise around callers so their voices come through clearly to the person on the other end, even in loud or busy environments. This can be managed at any time in in-call settings.

WhatsApp said these features are rolling out gradually and will be available to everyone soon, expressing its desire to make WhatsApp calling simpler to use.

Continue Reading

Technology

Modded Hosting With Reliable Backups: Biome Types Guide

Published

on

Modded Hosting

Modded Minecraft worlds take weeks to build. Custom biomes, terraformed landscapes, established bases — losing any of it to a corrupted chunk or a failed update is devastating. Backups aren’t optional for modded servers. They’re essential.

Modded hosting with reliable backups protects everything players have built across every minecraft biome types the pack introduces — without requiring manual backup routines that nobody remembers to run.

Why Modded Worlds Are More Vulnerable to Data Loss

Vanilla Minecraft worlds are relatively stable. Modded worlds have more ways to break. Mod updates can corrupt chunk data if block IDs change. Crashes during chunk generation leave partial files. Automated farms that run while no players are online can cause chunk-level issues over time.

Biomes added by mods require extra care. Changing biome mods later can cause unexpected problems. If the old biome data no longer exists, Minecraft may not know how to read parts of the world anymore. The Minecraft Wiki explains that every generated chunk keeps its own biome information in the save. Modded biomes require their mod to be present to load correctly — removing the mod without migrating chunks first causes permanent data loss in those areas.

Minecraft Biome Types: What Mods Add

People often focus on giant mountains or rare structures, but smaller biome changes matter too. A carefully designed minecraft grass biome can completely change the appearance of an entire region. Once that combines with improved forests, rivers, and mountain generation, exploration naturally takes longer because there’s almost always another interesting place nearby. There’s a massive difference once biome mods are installed. Biomes O’ Plenty alone adds over 80 biomes. Terralith adds another 95 plus, although it still builds worlds using Minecraft’s regular generation system rather than a custom one. Oh The Biomes You’ll Go adds tropical and fantasy biomes not found in either.

Each of these creates a richer world to explore — and more unique terrain to protect. A player who spends two sessions exploring and settling in a modded cherry blossom grove loses something irreplaceable if that chunk gets corrupted without a backup.

Content creator and modpack player Noxite has described modded biome exploration as one of the most memorable experiences in the game — “every new biome feels like discovering a location that exists only in your world.” Backups protect that discovery.

Many players only start thinking about backups after something goes wrong. It’s surprisingly easy for a modded world to develop problems. Maybe the server restarts halfway through chunk generation, or a mod update changes world data in a way the old save no longer understands. Even experienced server owners don’t get through every update without issues. Sometimes everything looks fine until someone explores a new biome and discovers broken chunks. At that point, having a recent backup is usually the simplest solution instead of trying to repair damaged terrain piece by piece.

What a Reliable Backup System Looks Like for Modded Servers

For modded worlds, backup requirements go beyond vanilla minimums:

  1. Daily automated backups — at minimum; hourly for active community servers
  2. Full world backups — not just player data; entire world folder including all dimensions
  3. Pre-update snapshots — automatic backup triggered before any mod or server update
  4. Offsite storage — backups stored separately from the server to survive hardware failure
  5. Easy restoration — one-click restore to a specific backup without technical support

Biome backup

Protecting Every Biome You’ve Explored

Minecraft biomes wiki entries for modded biomes often include notes about save compatibility across versions. The community’s experience is consistent: mod updates break worlds more often than player actions do. Regular backups are the only reliable protection.

Choose modded hosting with reliable backups that runs automatically, stores multiple restore points, and makes restoration simple. The time investment in setting up proper backups is always less than the time lost rebuilding after a preventable data loss event.

Continue Reading

Technology

5 Ways AI is Transforming Consumer Intelligence and Analytics

Published

on

AI consumer analytics

The rules have changed. How companies actually know their customers — really know them — looks almost nothing like it did ten years ago. Old-school research methods are drowning. Too slow, too narrow, too dependent on humans manually stitching together datasets that have already gone cold. Markets shift in days now, not quarters. And the cost of a slow read on consumer behavior keeps climbing. This isn’t just a tooling upgrade. The underlying logic of how businesses decide what to build, what to charge, and who to reach has been gutted and rebuilt from scratch. Staying reactive isn’t a strategy anymore. It’s a liability.

1. Real-Time Data Processing and Pattern Recognition

Consumer intelligence used to run on stale numbers. Analysts dug into data weeks — sometimes months — after whatever actually happened. Modern AI kills that lag. Entirely. These systems chew through enormous volumes of behavioral data on the fly, surfacing patterns that human teams couldn’t find in the same timeframe with ten times the headcount. Machine learning algorithms can process millions of customer interactions, transactions, and behavioral signals simultaneously — pulling clean signal out of what would otherwise be undifferentiated noise. A retailer can track sentiment across social media, reviews, and support tickets right now, catching a brewing problem or an emerging trend in hours rather than weeks. Inventory shifts, pricing moves, message pivots — all of it happens before a trend fully crystallizes. That’s a different game entirely.

2. Predictive Analytics and Consumer Behavior Forecasting

Here’s what actually changed: AI stops consumer intelligence from being a backward-looking exercise. Instead of cataloguing what customers already did, companies can now forecast what they’re likely to do next — and with striking accuracy. Advanced ML models thread together historical patterns and live behavioral signals to predict churn, flag high-value prospects, and project demand across entire product lines. A telecom company can spot which customers are quietly drifting toward a competitor before they ever make the switch — and intervene first. That’s not a marginal improvement. It’s a fundamentally different posture. Resources flow toward the segments that actually matter, rather than spreading thin across the whole base and hoping something sticks.

3. Personalization at Scale

Consumers expect personalized experiences. Full stop. Meeting that expectation at scale — for millions of people at once — is simply beyond what human analysts and traditional segmentation can deliver. Machine learning models read individual purchase histories, browsing patterns, preferences, and demographic signals to build dynamic profiles that drive product recommendations, custom messaging, and tailored interfaces. When building and refining these individualized profiles, marketers who need to enrich their first-party data with verified behavioral signals rely on audience data providers to ensure their models are trained on accurate, high-quality consumer information. An e-commerce platform can serve each visitor a genuinely different experience — different layouts, different offers, different content — all built around that visitor’s unique fingerprint. Conversion lifts. Lifetime value climbs. People respond when recommendations actually fit their lives, not just the average of everyone else’s.

4. Sentiment Analysis and Brand Perception Monitoring

Knowing how consumers feel about a brand means wading through unstructured mess. Reviews, comment threads, support tickets, social posts, video captions — none of it parses cleanly by hand at any useful speed. Natural language processing handles it. NLP systems automatically scan text-based content across digital channels, classifying sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral while bucketing feedback by topic, product feature, or customer segment. An automaker can track online conversations about a specific reliability concern and catch it before it snowballs into a full-blown reputation crisis. No waiting for quarterly surveys. No lag. Brand perception monitoring becomes continuous — and decisions about product fixes, messaging shifts, or service interventions get grounded in real signal rather than gut instinct.

5. Competitive Intelligence and Market Positioning Analysis

Competitive intelligence used to mean manual tracking, sprawling spreadsheets, and perpetually incomplete pictures. AI automates the entire collection-and-analysis loop. ML models watch competitor pricing moves, product launches, promotions, and messaging shifts across digital channels — then stack that data against a company’s own position. Gaps surface. Threats register earlier. A financial services firm can monitor exactly which themes competitors are pushing on social media and which ones are actually generating engagement — then sharpen their own positioning accordingly. Real-time visibility into competitive dynamics means strategic calls about where to invest, which markets to enter, and how to stand apart in crowded categories aren’t made blind anymore.

Conclusion

What AI has done to consumer intelligence isn’t incremental. It’s structural. Real-time processing of massive datasets. Forecasting future behavior instead of autopsying the past. Personalization that reaches millions, not hundreds. Continuous sentiment monitoring. Automated competitive tracking. None of these were realistic options a decade ago. They are now. Companies that wire these capabilities into their core operations make faster, sharper decisions — ones that show up directly in revenue, satisfaction scores, and market share. Those that don’t will keep falling further behind. And the gap between organizations that wield these tools well and those still grinding through traditional approaches? It’s not closing. It’s widening every quarter.

Continue Reading