This article is from the Slate, subtitle is “They’re buying IBM’s PC business. What’s next—McDonald’s?”
The New York Times has a genuine scoop today .IBM, which introduced its widely cloned personal computer in 1981, has put its PC business on the block. The news is not earth-shattering. PCs are a small business for IBM—the unit is expected to fetch between $1 billion and $2 billion, while IBM has a market capitalization of $162 billion. IBM lags far behind market leaders Dell and HP. And personal computers are a brutally competitive business, with Twiggy-like margins. What was once an expensive luxury has become a cheap commodity, propelled in large part by the rise of Taiwan and China as component manufacturers.
The surprise in the Times story is the potential buyer. IBM most likely won’t be selling the unit to an American competitor or to a Japanese rival like Fujitsu. Instead, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Steve Lohr report, the likely buyer is Lenovo , China’s biggest PC maker. (Lenovo used to be known as Legend.)
You can also see another New York Times article: “An Unknown Giant Flexes Its Muscles”
