Samsung In Talks With Lenovo To Sell Off PC Business

Megalith

Megalith

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Samsung’s PC division just isn’t profitable enough, so they’re trying to sell it off to Lenovo for around $850 million. The company has already gotten rid of its printer division—hopefully, they aren’t thinking about dropping monitors as well.

The Bell predicted the deal price could be worth more than 1 trillion won (US$850 million) even though the breakdown revenue of the PC business, affiliated with Samsung’s flagship information technology and mobile business division, has been rarely revealed. The talks have allegedly continued for months but with little progress so far, the report said. The planned sell-off of the PC business is in line with Samsung’s recent sale of its printer business division to HP Inc. for US$1.05 billion that was announced in September. The division is expected to be merged with the world’s largest printer maker in the latter half of next year.
 
I like Samsung laser printers, but both of these markets are crowded and have low margins.
 
These are the type of deals I never understand. What does Lenovo get out of this?

Samsung isn't known for making PCs or anything like that. Honestly I don't think I ever heard of a Samsung PC. I can't imagine they would have any special patients, and if they just want more production factories I would think it would be cheaper to just build a new factory vs buying out your competition.

There always seems to be these type of buy outs that to me make no sense so I must be missing something as I am sure that the company has to have a good reason to buy them. Like when Tiger Direct bought up Circuit City after they went under just to have the name.
 
I can only imagine it's for the production factories. Sure, you might be able to build them cheaper, but you couldn't do it as quickly and you'll have the legal challenges too. Then you need to start hiring employees to run the place. Buying someone out takes less time and less work. It's possible it could be cheaper.

Although, does Samsung actually manufacture it's own PCs or are those farmed out to Foxconn? I know Samsung has manufacturing plants, I just don't know exactly what they're for.
 
We use them at my university exclusively, as do many businesses here (I'm living in Seoul). They are generic, clone machines with off-the-shelf parts (Biostar mainboard, Intel dual-core CPUs); the only parts that are Samsung are the memory and HDD/SSD and the logo on the cases. I would call them more PC builders than makers.

The buyout is likely just for supply contracts...?
 
Prisoner849 said:
We use them at my university exclusively, as do many businesses here (I'm living in Seoul). They are generic, clone machines with off-the-shelf parts (Biostar mainboard, Intel dual-core CPUs); the only parts that are Samsung are the memory and HDD/SSD and the logo on the cases. I would call them more PC builders than makers.

The buyout is likely just for supply contracts...?
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They do laptops. Given how they are mostly up to date with specs, they probably are selling reasonably well.
 
Does this mean we can look forward to the Samsung ThinkPad and Samsung ThinkCentre?
Edit: I misunderstood. I thought Samsung was going to buy Lenovo's business. Didn't read carefully.
 
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Prisoner849 said:
No big deal 'cause the sale ain't happening.
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Someone hasn't dealt with Asian companies much. They'll deny anything until the ink on the contract is dry. So if they're "in talks", they're not going to admit it. As a result no = maybe.
 
I bought 2 samsung laptops that were just better than consumer class in terms of quality, and were spec'ed the way I wanted. The drivers were awful and the systems were essentially unusable due to random bugs (not software, perhaps software/hardware relationship). One would only turn on when it felt like it. Worst computers I ever had (returned after a week), but the potential was there to be the best computer I ever had.

That being said, the samsung laser printer I have is easily the best B&W printer I have ever owned. Wish I had got it sooner instead of going through HPs, brothers, and lexmarks.
 
Quix said:
Someone hasn't dealt with Asian companies much. They'll deny anything until the ink on the contract is dry. So if they're "in talks", they're not going to admit it. As a result no = maybe.
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Wow...thanks for the lesson. I am truly enlightened.
 
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