By Lee Su-hwan
shulee@ddaily.co.kr

Lenovo Korea’s PC inventory has almost drawn level with its quarterly PC shipment. The company, which has aggressively expanded market share, is now placed a burden to lower a high inventory in the medium to long term.

Plural industry sources said on Oct. 28 that Lenovo Korea had accumulated a stock of 35,000 PCs until the first half of this year. On the other hand, the firm shipped 46,000 PCs during the first quarter of this year and 39,000, during the second quarter. They included 34,000 laptops. This indicates that PC inventory of Lenovo Korea is larger than the volume of laptops shipped during the first half. PC inventory decreased to the level of 28,000 in the third quarter, which is still not much less than the volume of quarterly laptop shipment.

Lenovo Korea has already introduced a push strategy for its tablets, which is a new growth engine. It has set the goal of selling tablets as many as about a half of the PCs sold. As the firm’s annual PC shipment in Korea was about 130,000 in 2012, the company seemingly has set the goal of selling more than 60,000 tablets a year.

Lenovo has shipped 45,000 tablets until the third quarter. Its tablet sales slowed down a little during the first half of 2014 but the company has geared up for tablets sale since the start of the second quarter. Lenovo recently launched the new “Yoga Tablet” series and has unveiled a series of new products. It also conducts active marketing for their sales. All these activities seem related to its emphasis on the sales of tablets.

An industry observer said, “Lenovo Korea is expected to further push for selling more tablets during the fourth quarter, which can bring increased burden to some distribution networks. But it would be difficult for the company to drastically lower the PC inventory level for the time being.”