Lenovo Group Ltd S/Adr

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to Lenovo's Earnings Investor Webcast. This is Li Xiyuan, Director of Investor Relations at Lenovo. Thanks everyone for joining us. Before we start, let me introduce our management team joining the call today. Yuan Qingyang, Lenovo's Chairman and CEO. Winston Chang, Group CFO. Luca Rossi, President of Intelligent Devices Group. Ashley Grapparala, President of Infrastructure Solutions Group, Ken Wong, President of Solutions and Services Group, and Sergio Buniak, Senior VP of Mobile Business Group and President of Motorola. We will begin with earnings presentations, and after that, we'll open the call for questions. Now, let me turn it over to Yuanqing. Yuanqing, please.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share that Lenovo achieved extraordinary results last quarter, delivering on every commitment we made. This once again proves that Lenovo not only navigated the market cycle with operational excellence, but also seized growth opportunities through innovation. We are confident we can further build on this momentum to lead in hybrid AI and drive sustainable growth. Now, let's start at the group level. Last quarter, we delivered on our promise of double digital growth with sustained profitability in the second half of the fiscal year. Our group revenue reached an all-time high of US$22 billion, grew over 18% year-on-year, with double digital growth across all business groups. Our adjusted net income expanded 36% year-on-year, doubling the pace of revenue growth. AI is becoming our leading growth engine, as AI-related revenue surged more than 70% year-on-year, now representing nearly one-third of the group total. Our IDG, or intelligent devices, group delivered exceptional performance, with revenue growing 14% year-on-year to almost $16 billion, while maintaining industry-leading profitability. Despite the industry-wide component supply shortages and rising costs, our PC and smart devices business enhanced its competitiveness even further, Its revenue sustained rapid growth at 17% and PC volume growth outpaced the market for 10 consecutive quarters. Our PC market share for the 2025 calendar year was the highest in history. For our mobile business, we achieved both record volume and record activations for mobile business. Our ISG, our infrastructure solution group, continues its hyper growth, delivering record revenue of $5.2 billion, up more than 30% year-on-year, steadily moving the business closer to profitable growth. Just as I shared last quarter, the infrastructure market is undergoing an important shift from AI training on public cloud to AI inferencing increasingly happening on-prem and at the edge for enterprises. To better capture this trend, we carried out a strategic restructure. This initiative is designed to boost productivity by optimizing our cost structure, address market opportunities by refining our product portfolio, and enhance competitiveness by optimizing our BIN models and upgrading our sales force. The restructuring is expected to deliver more than $200 million annualized net savings in the next three years and put ISG on a solid pace of sustainable and profitable growth. SSG, or Solutions and Services Group, achieved over 22% operating margin at 18% year-on-year revenue growth, with accelerated growth in focused vertical industries, including manufacturing, retail, sports, transportation and smart cities. Looking ahead, we firmly believe in the trend of AI democratization, As AI becomes deeply integrated into individuals' daily lives and enterprise operations, it's far from a bubble, but a technological advancement that delivers tangible value. Lenovo will continue driving hybrid AI through personal AI and enterprise AI to capture the significant growth opportunities here. This is not just a vision, we are already delivering significant outcomes for customers. This January, we successfully held Lenovo Tech World at the CES, showcasing the progress in hybrid AI as well as announcing breakthrough innovations and products. In Personal AI, we introduced our AI super agent, Lenovo Kira, to the global market, along with a series of innovative AI devices. In Enterprise AI, within the framework of Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage, we shared how we bring AI inferencing closer to where data is generated, on-prem and at the edge. We also launched XIQ platforms and announced the AI Cloud Gigafactory in partnership with NVIDIA. We will start shipping Tira embedded devices as soon as the next quarter. to stay tuned for more updates. While leveraging innovation to drive growth, we will also continue leveraging operational excellence to navigate the market cycles and come out even stronger. With our scale, resilient global supply chain and strong partnerships, we have proven we can outperform the market again and again during the pandemic, trade tariffs, and more recently, component cost increase and supply shortage. In each cycle, we have consistently secured components, gained market share and improved profitability. Looking ahead, no matter how the market changes, Lenovo is fully prepared to drive continuous revenue growth and profitability enhancement with even greater resilience and stronger execution. In closing, I'd like to share, we do what we say, we own what we do. This is Lenovo culture. Last quarter, we delivered on our promise and achieved outstanding results on all fronts. Lenovo has entered an accelerated era of growth and profitability, reaching a whole new level of innovation and operational excellence. I have every confidence in our ability to deliver substantial returns to our shareholders and bring smarter AI to all. Thank you. Now, let me turn it over to our CFO, Winston. Winston, please.

Thank you, Yuanqing, and a good day, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. I'm pleased to walk you through Lenovo's results for the third quarter of fiscal year 25-26, a quarter that delivered record revenues, accelerating profitability, and continued AI revenue expansion. We deliver record-high fiscal quarter revenue of $22.2 billion, up 18% year-on-year, with double-digit year-on-year revenue growth across all business groups. Despite a year of tariffs and component supply-demand imbalances, Lenovo continues to demonstrate resilience. In the third fiscal quarter... Our strong top-line growth was driven by expanding market leadership in PCSD, record volume and activation in smartphones, and all-time high revenues from both ISG and SSG. AI is a multi-year growth engine for Lenovo, underpinned by our unmatched scale, diversified global portfolio, and continued investment in innovation. Our AI-related revenue grew 72% year-on-year and now represents 32% of total group revenue, driven by strong demand across AI devices, infrastructure, services, and solutions. Adjusted operating income was $903 million, an increase of 28% year-on-year, demonstrating operating leverage, efficiency gains, and a higher revenue contribution from premium offerings. Adjusted net income grew to $589 million, while adjusted net margin expanded to 2.7%, excluding one-time gains in charges for third quarter fiscal 24-25 and third quarter fiscal 25-26. On an operating basis, adjusted net income for the quarter increased by 36% year-on-year, doubling growth of revenues. Key exclusions from adjusted operating and net income include a $285 million one-time restructuring charge relating to ISG and enterprise sales, a $186 million non-cash fair value gain on warrants, and $29 million notional interest mainly from zero-coupon convertible bonds related to our strategic partnership with PIF Allot. Now let me walk you through the key highlights of our business groups. IDG delivered another exceptional quarter, strengthening Lenovo's position as the world's PC leader with continued market share gain. We expanded our global PC market share to 25.3%, up one percentage point year-on-year, extending our lead over our closest competitor by five percentage points and marking our second consecutive quarter as the only vendor to surpass 25% global PC market share since IDC data became available. Despite supply shortages and component cost pressures, PCSV delivered double-digit revenue growth year-on-year and stable operating margin, driven by operational excellence and continued innovation. AI PC momentum continued to accelerate, with revenue growing at high double digits year-on-year. Non-PC adjacencies also posed a strong double-digit growth with a clear margin uplift. On the mobile side, our Motorola business also deliver a record quarter. Volume and activation reach an all-time high with above-market growth across major sales geographies. At Tech World at CES, we extended our AI-native device portfolio with some of our most innovative product launches yet. We introduced the new Aura lineup, including the latest ThinkPad X1, 2-in-1, and Yoga Pro 9i. bringing next-gen personalized AI features to our flagship premium notebooks. We also debuted the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 AutoTwist, featuring an adaptive motorized dual rotation hinge designed to seamlessly shift between work and presentation modes. In desktops, our new ThinkCentre X series delivers modern AI-ready performance, complete with a dual screen setup for connected content creation. And in mobile, Motorola unveiled the Moto Signature, our new ultra-premium franchise and first thinnest smartphone in its class, and the Moto Razr Fold, the first book-style foldable featuring an expansive display and advanced AI capabilities. Together, these launches demonstrate how Lenovo is redefining the future of hybrid AI across PCs, desktops, and smartphones. At Techworld CES 2026, we also unveiled Kira, a cross-device AI superagent that brings our one personal AI, multiple devices vision to life. Kira is a unified entry point for LLMs to engage directly with end users and serves as the intelligence layer across the Lenovo ecosystem. is a user's personal assistant and AI twin across devices, capable of executing tasks using both on-device and cloud AI and continuously learning from user context while maintaining privacy by design. With Kira at the center of our end-to-end super agent ecosystem, we're elevating device value, deepening our integration with partners and developers, and expanding opportunities for services and subscription models. Together, Kira and our hybrid AI architecture enable a seamless, unified, intelligent experience that strengthens our competitive advantage across both personal and enterprise AI. Moving on to ISG, ISG delivers a record quarter generating revenue of $5.2 billion, up 31% year-on-year. We saw strong momentum across the business, driven by record CSP revenue from expanding customer base, enterprise and SMB transformation, and accelerated AI server momentum. Operating performance improved sequentially. Our AI server business achieved high double-digit revenue growth with a robust $15.5 billion pipeline. We also deployed the first Lenovo GB300 MVL72-based rack-scale solution, marking a significant milestone in next-generation AI infrastructure. Our Neptune liquid cooling revenue grew 300% year-on-year, supported by higher customer adoption across CSP, enterprise, and SMB businesses. We announced a one-time restructuring program this quarter in ISG, which we believe is a crucial step to realigning the cost structure and accelerating the transformation towards a sustained improved profitability in the business. Through cost structure realignment and operating model optimization, we are investing in our highest priority growth areas and positioning ourselves to capture the enterprise AI wave. ISG Transformation Program provides a clear path to profitability as early as next quarter and is targeted to achieve over $200 million annual runway net savings over the next three years. By scaling customer value, innovation, and driving one Lenovo execution, we're well prepared to capitalize on expanding opportunities. Our high-velocity transaction model simplifies the engagement, deployment, and maintenance experience for our customers and partners. These initiatives will boost sales efficiency and accelerate time to market, unlocking customer acquisition and positioning us favorably to capture multi-year CSV training and ESMV inferencing tailwinds. Our AI infrastructure portfolio continues to differentiate Lenovo across every major segment of the market. In CSP, our strategic collaboration of NVIDIA on the AI cloud gigafactory positions us at the forefront of hyperscale AI deployments. In enterprise and SMV, we expanded our AI inferencing portfolio with newly launched servers and solutions designed for various workloads, enabling enterprise customers to achieve accelerated deployment and scalability. In high-performance computing and AI, our Neptune liquid cooling technology continues to set the industry benchmark. Processor-level warm water cooling, for example, now enables reliable live Formula One broadcasts. SSG delivered a record revenue quarter, growing 18% year-on-year, marking the 19th consecutive quarter of double-digit year-on-year growth. Operating margin reached 22.5% near a historical high. Revenue mix continued to shift toward high growth areas this quarter. Managed services and project solutions together grew to 59.9% of SSG revenue. By enabling faster deployment and offering greater cost predictability, true-scale device-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service saw accelerated growth this quarter, driven by GPU and AI workloads. Our AI-enabled services, which have reduced cloud costs by more than 70% for Shishido and enabled 98% on-time delivery for ELEE, are driving measurable outcomes for leading global organizations that trust Lenovo to support their strategic AI initiatives. Our hybrid AI advantage, which powers iChain, Lenovo's AI-driven supply chain orchestration platform, and Football AI Pro, the FIFA co-developed AI knowledge assistant that delivers real-time performance analytics, continues to accelerate enterprise AI at scale, enabling the creation of next-generation superagents. SSG is a strategic position in the fastest-growing areas in the IT services industry, capturing a total addressable market of $360 billion and lever to the growing opportunities in managed services and project and solutions. In areas such as digital workplace services, hybrid cloud AI, and sustainability, SSG is growing at double the rate of market growth. These offerings allow us to scale the revenue at four-year CAGR of 23.9%, enabled by our differentiated technological expertise, long-term engagement models, and strength of our hybrid AI advantage. At Tech World at CES, we've announced the next phase of our hybrid AI advantage with the launch of Lenovo Agenic AI, a new full lifecycle enterprise solution for creating, deploying, and managing AI agents. And Lenovo XIQ, a new suite of AI-native delivery platforms designed to simplify and accelerate AI across the enterprise. Lenovo, Agentech AI, and XIQ seamlessly extend our solutions and services portfolio, strengthening our role as the execution engine to enable organizations to rapidly move from strategy to deployment. Before concluding, I want to highlight our success at Tech World at CES 2026. Lenovo won a record number of over 200 awards, including three of the prestigious CTA official Best of CES 2026 awards. With 14,000 attendees at the Sphere in Las Vegas and millions more viewing online, we brought together key industry partners such as Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Microsoft, FIFA, and, of course, the Sphere. This showcased the industry's broadest product portfolio at scale and our latest innovations for the global AI ecosystem, reinforcing our leadership in innovation and our unwavering commitment to hybrid AI. Along our success at CES, we continue to advance our sustainability agenda. We received a Global Lighthouse Network Award from the World Economic Forum with our Mexico manufacturing site added as our second lighthouse, a clear recognition of how we are applying innovation to strengthen our resilience, boost efficiency, and reduce environmental impact. Looking ahead, our strategy remains sharply focused and highly disciplined. With our global scale and proven operational excellence, we continue to execute reliably and outperform even in volatile markets. As we enter an accelerated era of growth with improved profitability, our hybrid AI strategy positions us to drive sustained profitable growth for our stakeholders with even greater resilience and executional strength.

Thank you, Winston. Now we will open the floor for questions, and this session will be English only. Please be reminded to limit yourself to two questions at a time. To submit a question, please type your question in the Q&A box on the right and click Submit. While we're waiting for the questions, allow me to introduce the management team again. Other than our Chairman Yuan Qingyang and CFO Winston Chen, we also have the following business leaders with us today for Q&A. Luca Rossi, President of Intelligence Devices Group, Ashley Grapproala, President of our Infrastructure Solutions Group, Ken Wong, President of our Solutions and Services Group, and Sergio Buniat, Senior VP of Mobile Business Group and President of Motorola. We'll begin the Q&A session by addressing several frequently asked questions leading up to the earnings, which we believe are especially relevant to this quarter's performance. So the first question, at Lenovo's 2026 Tech World during CES in January, we witnessed the successful launch of new products and services. As Lenovo continues to enhance its global brand and demonstrate its position as global tech leader, what do you see as the most significant opportunities in AI? How is Lenovo strategically positioned to capture these opportunities? For this question, may I please invite our Chairman and CEO, Yuan Qing, to address it. Yuan Qing, please.

thank you so this january as we successfully held the lenovo tech work at the ces comprehensively showcasing our care and progress in hybrid air including personal as well as enterprise air in personal ai we introduced our ai super agent lenovo hero to the global market, along with a series of innovative AI devices. So we will start shipping QRA embedded devices as soon as next quarter. So stay tuned for more updates. In enterprise AI, within the framework of Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage, we demonstrated how AI inference is brought closer to where data is generated on-prem and at the edge. We also launched the XIQ platforms and announced the AI called the Gigafactory in partnership with NVIDIA. In fact, so market continues to question whether AI is overheating. But in my view, there may be a bit more investment in certain areas. For example, frontier models, pre-training. So these are worth exploring, but not necessarily the only right path forward. However, looking at the AI as a whole, it's fundamentally a data technology, the technology fully leverage all forms of data accumulated throughout the human history to generate intelligence. And that is absolutely not a bubble, but a technological advancement that delivers tangible value. So looking ahead, we firmly believe AI Democratization is irreversible and unstoppable trend, but it will shift from public AI on call to AI influencing increasingly happening on-prem and at the edge, and more enterprise AI use cases, for example. So Lenovo has developed and implemented this hybrid AI strategy through the dual engine of personal AI and enterprise AI to capture the opportunity brought by AI democratization. So this is not just a long-term vision, but also a strategy we are executing with full commitment. So you can see the number from our last quarter results. So our AI-related revenue grew more than 70%. Now it has already accounted for one-third of our total revenue. So we will continue that pace. Thank you.

Thank you, Yuanqing. The next question is on the component causing crisis. cost impacting the entire hardware industry. How is Lenovo preparing to navigate this challenge? Looking ahead to the next financial year, how should we evaluate the market demand in the context of increasing component cost? For this question, may I please also invite Chairman Yuanqing to give your answers. Yuanqing, please.

Yeah, so definitely the supply shortage and the rising cost situation uh is uh uh precedented uh so and still not finished uh uh the dram uh caused the increase by 40 uh 50 last quarter but the current quarter versus last quarter almost doubled again uh even with the contract uh price uh so this structural imbalance between supply and demand. It's not simply a short-term fluctuation. It's likely to have a prolonged impact on the industry throughout this year. So we are closely monitoring the situation and taking agile action as necessary. But on the other hand, a volatile market could become an opportunity for Lenovo. As I always said, we have already proven ourselves many times. So you should remember when tariff hit about a year ago, so we were quite concerned, or you are quite concerned and expecting us to be heavily impacted. but instead by leveraging our operational excellence and our global local model, so we not only navigate that highly volatile period smoothly, but even further expanded our market share with improved profitability. Also, you can see from our last quarter's result, we actually effectively mitigate this impact A lot of approaches brought the sourcing capability, diversified sourcing strategy, flexible and resilient supply chain, and longstanding trust in the relationship with the suppliers to ensure consistent component of supply at a competitive cost. Looking ahead, so high material cost will probably constrain the demand for PC smartphone. But that's just from a unit or volume point of view. But given the higher pricing and market, shifting to the premium segment because of AIPC, AI phone. So we believe the overall PC revenue market will still grow year over year. For sure, because our strong supply chain and resilience, So, we also, we are confident to continue to drive the premier to the market. So, definitely, we cannot avoid the impact of the market cycles, but we can ensure stronger competitiveness. So, actually, we are still confident to deliver double digital growth in our PC. as well as infrastructure in the next couple of quarters. Thank you.

Thank you, Yanqing. Thank you very much. So we'll move on to the questions that we've just collected from analysts. The next question is from Cherry Ma from Macquarie. What is the outlook for PC and smartphone for the market and for Lenovo in 2026 in terms of shipment volumes, margins, and ASPs? So may I please invite Luca and perhaps followed by Sergio to address the question on PC and smartphone respectively. Luca, please.

Yes, can you hear me okay?

Yes, all clear. Thank you, Luca.

So thank you for the question, Sherry. I think there are multiple questions within one question, so I'll try to address them step by step. So let me start with the market. So given the inflationary cost environment, we think the market will see some decline year over year. At the moment, we are modeling a mid single digit decline for the units. But that decline will be offset by an higher ASP and likely a favorable product mix. Hence, the value of the market will not decline. For Lenovo, we will continue to grow at premium to market. It's something we did in the last 10 consecutive quarters. uh we see opportunities with the end of service of windows 10 there is still a significant portion of units to be upgraded we estimate more than 100 million aipc refresh a large base of devices that are now four five and even six years old so with that we are confident we will navigate this inflationary environment and this shortage supply dynamic better than our peers with large scale procurement, our long-term strategic partnership with the key players in the industry and of course with our innovation capabilities. Let me emphasize that our growth in shipments and premium to market is not is not just in shipment we are also winning in activations our channel inventory is very healthy and our stellar sellout is very strong so that to talk about the market regarding the average selling price asp or aur we expect it to go up in 2026 We will see how this plays out. Some customer might prefer to scale down the configuration. Other customer will just accept the price increase. At the moment we are modeling something in the mid single digit growth in average and we will continue to track quarter by quarter. Now last but definitely not least. regarding our margins. As we mentioned, it will be an inflationary environment, particularly driven by memory, DRAM, and NAND. There will be also certain platform cost up due to silicon cost. This situation, I will say, is not new to Lenovo. We have demonstrated many times that we are able to navigate those challenging environments. We are able to mitigate cost. manage prices, and at the end, maintain the strong profitability with market share gains. So I think we are confident we will navigate in the next few quarters in a sustainable way. We will continue to deliver industry-leading profitability. We will continue to win in the market. And let me close in this way. At the core of all of this, it remains...

innovation and operational excellence as the tool you know foundation of our success with that i'll pass to sergio hi hello everyone so i mean very similar uh to the p3 uh we expect a high single digit decline for the mobile market we also are seeing 10 quarters of premature market Last quarter, not only we saw premium to market, but we saw premium to market in every geography. We expect the premium to market to continue in the moving quarters. And while units decline, revenue expected to go up. There are, I think, besides the adjustment on the commodity cost, we are moving further ahead to premium in our mix. We just launched at CS our new signature ultra-premium franchise. We just announced a new Razer Fold. So, I mean, we believe we will sustain a premium to market in all deals, revenue and price adjustments that we need to manage, but also a significant improvement in mix as we move in the new launch that starts in the next two months.

Thank you, Sergio. Thank you. We move on to the next question. It's on ISG. So it's from Le Ping from Huatai Securities. Congratulations on the strong performance of ISG this quarter. We saw a shift of AI demand from training to inference. With the restructuring plan announced this quarter, how has the company strategically positioned its product portfolio to capture the fast-growing AI inference market? What is the rationale behind ISG restructuring plan, and how do you envision ISG's growth trajectory and profitability in the coming years as a result of the plan? I'll probably invite Yuanqing to address this question first, and then followed by Ashley to give more granularity. Yeah. Yuanqing, please.

Okay. So just as I shared earlier, At the beginning, the infrastructure market is undergoing an important shift from AI training on public cloud to AI inference increasingly happening on-prem and at the edge for enterprises. Thus, I would say the restriction we just made is more of a transformation towards the new trend of bringing AI inferencing closer to end users. So we are making agile, fast, and decisive moves to build new capabilities and to boost the efficiency and the productivity by simplifying traditional compute uh pro portfolio uh meanwhile uh address market opportunities by strengthening uh uh ai uh uh related uh product portfolio a particular uh ai influencing uh they are influencing uh product portfolio um so meanwhile we are enhancing uh competitive competitiveness uh so by optimizing our business model for SMB and large enterprise relationship customers respectively. We are also upgrading our sales force to meet the huge demand. So with this focus and transformation, we are narrowing the loss every quarter with our IST business. And now we are on track to turn around this business as early as in the current quarter. At a one-time cost of, you know, we booked 285 million restructuring cost last quarter, but we expect to deliver more than 200 million annualized savings over the next three years. So we are very confident. have a strong conviction that with this clear strategic move, our ISG business will come, will start the sustainable and profitable growth and deliver improving performance going forward. So probably actually you can add more.

Thank you, YY, and thank you for the question. It's hard to add more than our chairman just added. He said it quite well, but maybe to be repetitive and add a little bit more. We all agree we're at an extremely important inflection point. And as YY and Winston both mentioned earlier, it's not quite certain if we're in the very beginning, early beginning, I think we all know that as we look backwards, maybe five years out, we'll know the answer to that, but it's very clear with our customers and our partners that the era of AI inferencing and adoption into production and usage is just beginning, but it is beginning very quickly. That's why it is a clear inflection point and an opportunity for us to take very decisive action, not just to transform, but to accelerate the transformation, to bring it in, to make it happen faster. And that's the very important part of the why. We're focused on investing in targeted investments for enterprise AI era, and that's going to include optimizing our end-to-end transactional model, The faster, more agile methodology of the operating model allows our customers to also adopt their AI into their systems more iteratively, faster, quicker, with better agility as well on their side. We simplify our portfolio to focus on digital transformation and AI adoption solutions. And as well, I mentioned, we're increasing our go-to-market AI skill sets to really help partners, customers on their AI journeys as well as a trusted technology provider to them. We believe these actions will increase speed, improve our agility and enable increased leverage from our operating model. I believe part of the question was why now? It's because we're certain and committed to leading in the AI era of AI democratization. because we're only at the beginning stages the opportunity to lead is right now this one time restructuring allows us to accelerate that transformation and the confidence is actually quite high in our stated goals of saving 200 million on an annualized basis over the next three years because we aren't just starting we've been hard at work on transformation projects throughout calendar year 2025 and we get to see the significant progress on our internal indicators of increased AI productivity, portfolio optimization, increasing velocity on our operating model, and increased sales capability. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Yanchi. Thank you, Ashley. We're going to move on to the next question, which is from Howard, from Morgan Stanley. So aside from memory, which other components are you seeing pricing increases, and how would this impact IDGs margins over the next few quarters? Any strategy in place to address the potential issues? So may I please invite Luca to address this question, please? Luca, thank you.

Sure. Thanks, Howard. So regarding other components, so I will say the cost increases are largely in the memory space. There are also additional cost up in the silicon or in the silicon area, given the demand and supply unbalance, particularly in certain manufacturing nodes. the rest of commodities of building a pc or a phone i would say are largely stable and maybe there are even some opportunities for cost down in certain other areas now protect our margins is definitely one of our key objectives and that is achieved through a combination of actions. You can think about product innovation, design to cost innovation, expanding our supplier base, making long term strategic purchases, of course, dynamic pricing at the end, you still have a market to face. And then pricing, I believe will go up, tight expense management, and definitely our laser precision in operations. Maybe it's also in the area of how to expand and protect our GP. We are also focusing and accelerating on what we call non-PC revenues. So all the adhesions to PC services, accessories, These are all margin reach and or areas where we have still a significant room to grow. So that will be part of the several actions that we are driving to navigate and to make sure we can protect our margin and our profitability. Thank you.

Thank you, Luca. Great. Next question is also from Howard Kao from Morgan Stanley, and this is on ISG. So could you please remind us the breakdown between AI server, general server for cloud, and enterprise server within ISG? And can you help to give some color on the outlook for these three end segments for Lenovo this year? So, Ashley, please.

Thank you for the question. We don't have a breakout. of those segmentations. As we've said before, our AI server growth is quite significant, outpacing our general growth. So the mix is shifting towards AI server growth as we expected it would. For us, perhaps to give a little color on the market and outlook, if you take The bold statement that the market is effectively sold out from a high-value component perspective for, let's say, a quarter, two quarters, three quarters, then you'll see, as we discussed earlier, that we'll see increasing costs from CPU slash DRAM and other components going forward. And so infrastructure providers like Lenovo will be focused on efficiency, productivity, scale, in order to minimize pass-through impacts to our end customers. But there will be increasing costs throughout 2026. In the CSP space, we're likely to maintain or increase infrastructure CapEx spending. We don't actually see that being deflected by the increasing costs. uh we expect ai training and related dc spend a stay at double high double digit year-over-year growth per your question of csp general versus ai we're actually seeing that highly correlated ai growth for training or frontier may be slightly different but in general what we're seeing is any uh growth related to AI increasingly is growing across data compute elements in the cloud as well for our service providers. We think our strategy there of having our own world-class manufacturing gives us an edge and a differentiation in efficiency and productivity because we can serve these at-scale customers with our scale. And in a supply-constrained environment, we think other factors and we know other factors will be prioritized, like speed of deployment. Lenovo's already deployed, for instance, GB300 racks of infrastructure We just announced our joint effort that's been underway with NVIDIA called Lenovo NVIDIA AI Cloud Geofactory. And this helps speed up our customers' time to first token, which is very important in an inflationary environment. In the enterprise space, we see that it's likely that CIOs, business leaders, will be facing, you know, this challenge of increasing costs within their technologies. but also while driving AI adoption to help offset that with productivity. Lenovo is going to help by prioritizing AI productivity business value projects and really focused on production deployments. The surveyed CIOs that we talked to, 93% are expecting a positive ROI from their AI deployments. This gets more difficult with the cost environment. And that's why, for instance, at Tech World, we talked about not only being focused on delivering Rackscale solutions with NVIDIA and AMD, but that we're already leading the industry in enterprise AI inference solutions. across a portfolio optimized for compute, storage, and software. A great example for me is the Dink System, SR650EI. It's already set many inference benchmark world records. Now, 84% of those CIOs have to leverage hybrid AI capabilities because they have to have the workload where the data is irrelevant. that's why we've also announced our lenovo hybrid ai advantage program that can span from private cloud economics like truescale which is becoming increasingly more important in this environment to industries that need reliable edge inferencing platforms like our sc or 55i so i think When it comes to the enterprise side, we see the market very similar to as Lupe discussed earlier, where perhaps there is downward pressure on units but increasingly offset, more than offset, by richness of each unit and content. That becomes important because Lenovo differentiates our supply chain, our world-class reliability, and our energy-efficient IP like Neptune will come together and help build that better ROI outcome for the customer despite the inflationary cost. So we believe that Our differentiation in AI operations, high-performance systems delivered with extreme efficiency is going to be even more aligned to helping our future customers. Thank you.

Thank you, Ashley. The next question is from Cherry Ma from Macquarie. For SSG, what are customers' IT OPEX versus CAPEX spending trends, and what's the implication of our growth outlook this year? This question is for SSG. I would like to invite our SSG president, Ken Wong, to answer the question. Thank you.

Thank you, Jerry, for the question. Well, we definitely see an increasing trend of OPACs versus CAPACs, probably at the rate of 2X that of CAPACs. I think one of the reasons is being, for example, our true scale as a service across our devices and infrastructure one of the value proposition that resonate a lot with our customer, especially during the period of component price volatility is about predictability, right? And also our XIQ platform help to optimize the compute and persona and make sure customer get the most out of their infrastructure and device investment. And from a Lenovo perspective, if we were able to get into a true-scale as-a-service engagement, there are a couple of benefits. One is when we look at the historical data, retention rate for true-scale as-a-service is usually higher than 90%, so a very, very high retention rate compared to a CapEx motion. The other thing is once we get into a contract, we're able to understand the customer better, understand the opportunity, and as well as the challenges, and hence that gives us more opportunity to serve the customer on a broader basis. Last but not the least, right, such a contract is a multi-year contract and also with a scope way beyond the hardware scope. For example, include software and services, and that always results in a higher profitability for the company, right? So in a nutshell, I think we're still very positive about the pace of growth for our TrueScale business for the reason that I shared. So thank you.

Thank you, Ken. The next question is from Tony Jung from CLSA. How is AI reshaping the SSG business compared with a pre-AI era? What has adoption been like for your AI-enabled vertical solutions, and how are they ramping as they address customer business challenges? So this question is also for Ken from SSG. Ken, over to you, please.

Thank you, Tony. Well, a big question. So a couple of things, right? When I look at the customer requirement in the past, probably six months compared to before, there are two main changes. One is, you know, from Gen AI to a Gentic AI. Gentic AI is about resolving not just one problem, but a complex problem with a lot of steps, things like that. So that will be one change. The other change is very obvious is customer are no longer looking for proof of concept kind of project, right? They're looking for production, real production and with impactful and meaningful outcomes. So those are the two changes. And as a result, I think our hybrid AI advantage is, which is a comprehensive framework and offerings across compute, data, platform use cases, and consulting services, are really able to help our customer to adopt agentic AI at scale. A couple of examples, I think one is we successfully helped one of the world's leading dairy companies to use a Gentex solution to improve their supply chain operation efficiency by 20%. The other example is we worked with a global 500 technology company to help to use Gen AI to modernize their customer service centers around the world. And, again, this is by, you know, a Gen Tech solution, which is a team of agents, all with different roles and responsibilities to achieve complex tasks. And with that, we were able to help this customer to improve their efficiency by 20% and also significant uplift in terms of customer satisfaction. So we continue to see the trend in terms of from POC to real production, from Gen AI to Agenda AI. And I think Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage is perfectly fit for these kind of requirements in the market. Thank you.

Thank you, Ken. Cautious of the time, we'll take one more question. The last question is from Jordan Pong from Franklin Templeton. Is there any update on the collaboration with Allat? What is the progress on the expansion in Middle East? To this question, I would like to invite our group CFO, Winston, to address. Winston, please. So given the time, I think Winston is moving on to the next interview session. So this will be the end of this earning webcast. And thanks to everyone for joining. Thank you.

No, no, no. Sorry. So Winston is answering questions. I was in the middle of answering.

Okay. Yeah. Is it over?

Yeah. Please go ahead, Winston. Yeah, we can hear you.

yes so the strategic investment clearly very uh important we're aligned you can see the news the middle east continues to be very much uh investing ai as part of our initiative you can see where our isg business is very much aligned to this trend particularly on global infrastructure spend so very much aligned to capture this opportunity our plans is well on track in fact uh and started uh manufacturing we'll have a a grand opening of our office and our full effort there in a few months' time, which you will see the news. And also, if you would like to attend in person, I think we'll be very open to have investors there as well for you to see in person. So absolutely, thank you for your question.

Thank you, Winston. Thank you, everyone, for joining. This will be the last question and end of this earnings website. Thank you. Goodbye.