Lenovo Will Not Buy IBM Server Division

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

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Chinese computer firm Lenovo will not buy the troubled server division of International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM). The unit is considered one of IBM’s worst performers. The U.S. firm would have been well rid of it. As usual with most corporate sales negotiations, the breaking point of the talks was price.

CNN Money reports on the Lenovo-IBM talks:

News of the negotiations surfaced last month in various publications and were confirmed by Fortune. Bloomberg put the value of the potential deal, which would cover IBM’s sale of its so-called x86 server business, at between $2.5 billion and $4.5 billion. Others suggested IBM was seeking as much as $6 billion. Lenovo is said to have balked at the price tag for the business, which generates close to $5 billion in sales, or about a third of IBM’s overall server revenue, according to estimates.

Shares of IBM are down fractionally in premarket trading to $199.60. The 52-week range is $199.20 to $202.17.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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