Samsung considering selling PC business to Lenovo for £680m

Reported move comes two years after firm fled the European market

Samsung is reportedly considering flogging its ailing PC business to Lenovo for a sum of around £680m.

A report on the The Investor says the South Korean firm is in talks with Lenovo about a possible sale of its PC division, just months after it sold its printer business to HP.

The report claims that, if a deal was to go ahead, it would be valued at around $850m (£680m).

A former Samsung executive was quoted as saying: "Considering the close business relationship between PCs and printers, it seems quite obvious that Samsung, after its PC business sell-off, is withdrawing from the PC market."

Samsung has already stopped selling its PCs in the UK. The firm made a sharp exit from the European market in 2014 after failing to compete with the likes of HP and Lenovo, following in the footsteps of Sony.

Two years on and Lenovo continues to dominate the PC market, with the latest figures from analyst outfit Gartner showing that the firm commanded a 20.9 per cent share of the market in the third quarter of 2016, up from 20.2 per cent the previous year.

Buying up Samsung's PC biz, which still operates in the US and other parts of the gobe, would no doubt help Lenovo further increase its lead over rivals. As it stands, HP ranks as the world's second largest PC vendor with a 20.4 per cent share of the market, and Dell comes in third with 14.7 per cent.

Lenovo, which acquired IBM's Personal Computer Division in 2005, is reportedly also in talks to scoop up Fujitsu's PC business.

According to reports, the company is in talks with Fujitsu to take a controlling stake in the firm's PC business after Fujitsu's cunning plan to offload it into a joint venture with Sony and Toshiba ended in failure.

The Japanese hardware vendor has confirmed reports that the two companies are in talks, although they would appear, at this stage, to be haggling over price.