Lenovo shows the PC is not dead yet Who says the PC is dead? Lenovo's notebook sales rose 8 per cent year-on-year in the three months to September, a period when global industry shipments fell by 12 per cent. Fiscal second quarter results on Thursday showed clearly that the Chinese company is not just the world's biggest PC maker, it is also the only one that has its act together: Acer this week lost its second chief executive in three years, HP is still has at least three years to go in its turnaround plan, and Dell has retreated from the public markets to nurse its wounds. Lenovo, meanwhile, notched up a 13 per cent year-on-year increase in fiscal 2Q sales, to $9.8bn. More impressively, net profits are up by a third with operating margins, at 2.89 per cent, the highest in more than four years. Doing well in PCs at the expense of everyone else had a lot to do with this - laptops still contribute just over half of Lenovo's revenues. The company remains dominant in China and across Asia, but it is its storming of the European and American markets that led to the most recent growth - it shipped forty per cent more PCs to the Americas than a year ago and is now the biggest in Brazil, the world's third biggest market. But with tablet shipments set to overtake laptops for the first time, all this makes Lenovo the king of a rapidly shrinking hill. Lenovo has made inroads into smartphones and tablets and recorded rapid growth in both categories, though it is still very far from challenging Apple and Samsung. The problem Lenovo has is that, unlike in PCs where it is dominant in China and can use that as a base to expand abroad, with tablets and smartphones it is facing fierce competition even within China. Lenovo's smartphone market share in China has been flat at 13 per cent both this year and last, according to Canalys - while Samsung has leapt ahead to take the number one spot with a 21 per cent market share. Lenovo chief executive Yang Yuanqing calls his company's strategy "Protect and Attack." That may have worked for the PC but with smartphones and tablets, it'll have to be a pretty big attack. Lenovo may well succeed in doing so, but if it does, it probably won't be because Mr Yang hired Ashton Kutchner to design their tablets.