Lenovo or Thursday announced the acquisition of IBM low-end server business

"Lenovo is close to acquiring IBM's low-end server business, and the deal will be announced as early as Thursday," The Wall Street Journal English quoted the source as saying on the morning of January 23. Companies currently considering acquiring IBM's low-end server business include Lenovo, Dell and Fujitsu. Although it has become the world's largest PC manufacturers, but Lenovo in the enterprise server market is still small. If IBM's low-end server business is acquired, Lenovo's 50 billion dollar server market will become a competitive manufacturer. In the third quarter of last year, Hewlett-Packard was the world's largest server vendor with a revenue market share of 28%, compared with 23% and 16% for IBM and Dell, according to IDC. Last spring, Lenovo also discussed the acquisition of IBM's low-end x86 server business, but the talks failed because of a failure to agree on the value of the business. Lenovo's valuation of the business was less than $2.5 billion trillion, a source said. Multi-message shows that the two sides of the transaction price between 202.5 billion dollars. But two companies are now starting negotiations again. The performance of IBM's hardware business has been sluggish since last spring, raising concerns about IBM's future prospects. Selling low-end server services will ease some of the concerns and help IBM better focus on software and services to boost profitability. For Lenovo, the company is trying to diversify its business as the PC market slides in recent years. Lenovo, for example, launched its smartphone business in 2010, a business that is fast growing, and Lenovo has become the second-largest maker of smart machines after Samsung in the Chinese market. Servers and other enterprise market products will bring new revenue sources to Lenovo. If the deal with IBM is finalized, it will be the most important step for Lenovo to enter the enterprise computing market, and it will further strengthen software and services for enterprise users in the future. Lenovo is already developing in this direction. In 2012, Lenovo and EMC established joint ventures to develop and sell server and networked storage devices. In addition, Lenovo has invested 100 million of dollars in its first corporate software development center in São Paulo, Brazil. Lenovo, in a Tuesday announcement in the Hong Kong stock exchange, said it was in the middle of a preliminary negotiations on a potential takeover, but did not explicitly point out that the negotiations involved a server business. Lenovo also said it had not yet reached a deal. Lenovo's shares rose 2.8% per cent on the day, affected by the news. Lenovo previously acquired IBM's lost PC business and developed it into a lucrative business. Albert Moel, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, believes that if IBM's low-end server business is acquired, Lenovo can also get good profit margins by cutting operating costs while bringing Lenovo onto a different growth curve. Steve Zhang, Macquarie Securities analyst Steve Zhang, said Lenovo had proved to be able to perform well in its acquisitions, as did Lenovo's acquisitions in Germany and Brazil over the past few years. The price of the current deal will depend on whether Lenovo is acquiring the hardware business itself, or whether it includes services based on low-end servers. Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's low-end server business will also face regulatory hurdles in the US, with approval from the U.S. Congress and the Foreign Investment Commission. Earlier this week, there were also reports that Dell was also considering acquiring IBM's low-end server business. (Chu Yue)