The world's top PC corporation, China's Lenovo, is rapidly introducing a large number of DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) models into its product lineup, and observations suggest that the PC market is entering a new phase. In the market, Lenovo is pointed out as a major beneficiary of the DeepSeek expansion, with its stock price soaring over 40% in just a month.
Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Lenovo, noted during a performance announcement on the 20th (local time) that DeepSeek would have a significant positive impact across the industry, including Lenovo. He stated, "With new large language models (LLMs) that have high inference efficiency and low expenses, anyone will be able to access AI." He predicted that as the use of AI rapidly increases, demand for IT devices such as PCs and tablets, as well as for GPU (graphics processing unit) servers, will also rise.
Yang noted, "Deploying AI does not necessarily incur high expenses," adding, "On-device AI and edge AI are maturing based on higher efficiency and lower expenses, which perfectly aligns with Lenovo's hybrid AI strategy that combines hardware and software."
In the industry, it is reported that due to DeepSeek's low development expenses and open-source approach, the applicability in various AI applications, such as AI PCs, is expected to increase significantly. The AI inference model 'DeepSeek R1', introduced last month, is said to demonstrate similar performance to the inference AI model 'O1', released by OpenAI in September last year, but at a lower cost. In fact, within a month, corporations in various sectors, including telecommunications and software, have rapidly adopted the DeepSeek model. Lenovo also integrated DeepSeek's AI model into its AI PCs starting from earlier this month. By integrating DeepSeek into Lenovo's AI assistant 'Xiao Ten', users can utilize DeepSeek AI services on PCs without internet connectivity.
Yang projected that thanks to the introduction of DeepSeek and the growth of AI, 25% of Lenovo's total PC shipments this year will be AI PCs. He anticipated that this proportion could increase to as much as 80% by 2027. Lenovo, which depends on the Chinese market for more than half of its revenue, first introduced AI PCs to the Chinese market in May last year and then expanded sales to the global market in September of the same year. Recently, global investment bank UOB analyzed in a report that the introduction of DeepSeek has clarified the projected replacement cycle for Lenovo's AI PCs. In the future, Lenovo plans to strengthen its cooperation with DeepSeek not only for PCs but also for various products such as tablets and smartphones, believing that introducing DeepSeek is essential to target the vast domestic market.
Lenovo is confident it will continue to see performance growth despite a 10% additional tariff on Chinese products from the U.S. Yang explained, "Lenovo has a global manufacturing network that includes its own factories and outsourcing facilities, making operations flexible and resilient." The revenue for Lenovo's fiscal year third quarter (October to December 2024), announced on this day, was $18.8 billion (approximately 27 trillion won), a 20% increase compared to the same period last year, and net profit reached $693 million (approximately 994.2 billion won), more than double from a year earlier. This greatly exceeds market expectations (revenue of $17.8 billion, net profit of $307 million). According to market research firm IDC, Lenovo maintained a leading market share of 24.5% in the PC market in the fourth quarter of last year.