When IDC published its latest ranking of China’s IT services market this month, the name at the top did not change. Lenovo’s solutions-and-services unit kept the No. 1 position for a ninth consecutive year, and its share of the market in 2025 reached a nine-year high, according to figures the research firm released. For a company better known for shipping laptops than for consulting, the result is evidence of a decade-long reinvention that now sits at the center of its growth story.
The unit has grown faster than the industry average for several consecutive years, according to IDC’s data, and the lead over its pursuers has widened rather than narrowed. Lenovo says the strength now spans its main business lines, from device support and managed services to cloud platforms and AI-related offerings. People close to the company describe the change as deliberate: nine years ago, the services operation was largely a support arm for the hardware Lenovo sold; today, they say, it is built around higher-value AI solutions and digital transformation projects sold to corporate customers and government agencies.
The stakes are visible in Lenovo’s own numbers. Services carry fatter margins than PC hardware, a business that has spent years absorbing price wars and inventory swings. As PC shipments plateau, the company’s leadership has pushed a strategy that blends devices, infrastructure, and services into one pitch: a customer who buys a Lenovo server also buys the software, the maintenance, and the consulting that runs on top of it. IDC’s latest tally suggests the approach is working at the top of the market, even as competition intensifies below it.
China’s IT services market has grown more crowded in recent years. Domestic rivals with deep cloud businesses have moved aggressively into consulting and managed services, while global firms have pulled back or restructured their China operations. The result is a market where scale and local relationships matter as much as technology. Lenovo’s homegrown manufacturing footprint and its ties to large state-owned and enterprise customers give it an advantage that pure software players struggle to match, according to analysts who follow the sector.
The services push also gives Lenovo a hedge. The company’s hardware business is increasingly exposed to the AI buildout, with demand for AI servers and high-performance PCs rising sharply. Services attach to that demand at a different pace and with different economics: a server sale is a one-time transaction, while a services contract renews year after year and deepens with each renewal. Analysts say the IDC ranking matters less as a trophy than as evidence that Lenovo can compound revenue in a way hardware cycles do not allow.
Under the surface, the transformation has been gradual. Lenovo built its services business through a string of acquisitions over the past decade, folding in data-center and software capabilities, and it has steadily reorganized sales teams around solutions rather than products. Executives have described the goal as moving from a company that sells boxes to one that sells outcomes. The IDC data suggests that message is landing with buyers, who are spending more on AI readiness assessments, cloud migration, and security services, according to people familiar with Lenovo’s pipeline.
The market itself is shifting under the contestants. Chinese enterprises are in the early stages of a broad AI adoption wave, and most of them lack the in-house skills to deploy the technology themselves. That gap is the services industry’s opportunity: companies that can advise on what to buy, install it, integrate it with legacy systems, and train workers to use it are capturing budgets that once went to pure software licensing. Lenovo’s position in the IDC ranking reflects its ability to serve customers across that entire chain, from the device in the employee’s hand to the data center running the model.
There are limits to the story. China’s IT services market is fragmented, and the largest player in IDC’s ranking still holds a share measured in single digits. Price competition is intense, and government procurement cycles can swing demand from one quarter to the next. Lenovo’s services unit also depends on the health of the broader economy: when corporate customers cut budgets, discretionary projects such as AI pilots and cloud migrations are often the first to be delayed. Margins in services can be squeezed by labor costs, which rise every year in China’s major cities.
Still, the direction is clear. Nine years ago, Lenovo’s services operation was a cost center attached to a hardware giant. Today it is a growth engine in its own right, and IDC’s data puts it ahead of every rival in China. The company’s challenge is to keep compounding that lead as the market shifts toward AI, where customers are uncertain about what they need and willing to pay for guidance. In that sense, the ranking released this month is less a finish line than a starting point, and the competition for the No. 1 slot is only beginning.
