Dell exec takes swipe at 'struggling' Lenovo

Dell's EMEA president also talks up ambitions to overtake the competition in the server market

Dell's EMEA president, Aongus Hegarty, has side-swiped at Lenovo, claiming the Chinese giant is "really struggling".

Hegarty said Lenovo has been wavering, "in every respect to be frank".

"There is a significant complexity to their business between mobile phones, PCs and servers," he said. "Clearly the model some of our competition has adopted of just maintaining volume and billing large inventory through this year has become a huge challenge for a number of companies in the second half of the year. Particularly as volume and inventory got to such levels, then needing to sell through those inventory levels."

When asked about the acquisition of IBM's x86 server business, Hegarty said he didn't think the process has proved successful.

"You can only look at the results you have seen in the market which show they have lost significant share over the last 12 months," he said. "So if you believe at least holding share would be a success then clearly from that perspective, it hasn't gone well."

Hegarty also said that for Dell, the company is gaining fast traction in its own x86 server business.

"We are close [to being number one] in many markets in x86. We are number one in China, in France we are very close to being number one, and at the moment we are number two globally with a small gap, which over the last two years has been narrowing here in Europe.

"I also think it's important that when you look at the server business, you look at it from a revenue perspective, not just from a unit perspective. There are a lot of units at the very low-end of the server business that don't really add a lot of capability to customers. And for us, it's about what's happening across the server area, with hyper-converged as part of the blueprint.

"So we are seeing significant acceleration in terms of server revenue and there we are taking significant share."

He added the firm is not far from catching up with HP, and should "narrow this gap" over the next two years.