Lenovo looks to buy Samsung's PC business for one trillion won

Samsung continues to retreat from barely profitable businesses

Lenovo is reportedly interested in taking Samsung's ailing PC business off of its hands for around one trillion won (£680m).

According to a report in the The Investor, the South Korean company is in talks with Lenovo about a possible sale of its PC division, a deal that would come just months after Samsung offloaded its printer business to US PC and printer maker HP.

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.