Lenovo is buying a controlling stake in Fujitsu's PC business

Lenovo on Thursday announced it is buying a 51 percent stake in Fujitsu’s personal computing business, a move it hopes will help it regain the crown of world’s largest PC manufacturer.

Lenovo said it will pay 17.85 billion yen (around $156 million) for the unit up front but will adjust the amount based on Fujitsu’s performance over the next few years. The aggregate consideration received by Fujitsu will be 28 billion yen, 25.5 billion yen of which is credited to Lenovo.

According to IDC analyst Bryan Ma, Lenovo has been trailing HP at the global level by about 1-2 percentage points of share for the past two quarters. In theory, the Fujitsu acquisition should help close the gap.

Indeed, IDC and Gartner both said in July that HP was once again the world’s largest PC vendor, a title HP lost to Lenovo a few years earlier.

As of June 1, 2017, Fujitsu’s computing arm had 1,128 employees. The company isn’t a huge player in the consumer PC market in the US but having been around for more than 80 years, it certainly knows a thing or two about IT.

Interestingly enough, Bloomberg is reporting that Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing is taking costs out of his company’s mobile business which hasn’t made much progress since buying Motorolafrom Google for $2.91 billion. With the PC market seemingly stabilizing and its struggles in mobile, Lenovo may be refocusing its efforts a bit.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal year 2018.