Lenovo

US$69.1 billion in revenue for fiscal 2024/25—a 21% leap and the second-highest in company history—validates Lenovo's scavenging strategy: acquiring carcasses others abandon, then extracting value competitors missed. When IBM shed its PC division in 2005 ($1.75B for hardware that made IBM famous), Lenovo didn't just buy assets—it practiced autophagy at scale, digesting the ThinkPad brand, enterprise relationships, and global distribution into a Chinese manufacturer few knew. The PC division IBM considered non-strategic became Lenovo's foundation for market leadership: 24.5% global share in 2024, dwarfing HP (19.9%) and Dell (14.4%), with a gap that widens each quarter.

The pattern repeated with Motorola Mobility, whose smartphone revenue reached historic highs in 2024/25 with 27% hypergrowth. Lenovo extracts value from acquired IP through metabolic efficiency—not revolutionary innovation, but incremental optimization across manufacturing, supply chain, and channel relationships. The AI PC transition (80% of portfolio AI-optimized by 2027) shows niche construction: Lenovo leading Windows AI PC market not through inventing AI, but through retrofitting existing strengths (manufacturing scale, OEM relationships, enterprise trust) to new substrate.

Infrastructure Solutions Group's 63% revenue surge to US$14.5 billion reveals diversification through horizontal gene transfer—acquiring capabilities (servers from IBM, phones from Motorola) rather than evolving them internally. Non-PC revenue at 47% proves the scavenger analogy extends: vultures don't just eat one carcass; they optimize foraging across territories. At 16,040+ retail locations and 117,201 employees, Lenovo demonstrates how hermit crabs scale—borrowing shells (brands, IP, customer bases) to protect growth, then engineering hybrid architectures (on-premise + cloud AI) that established players can't match. The lesson: in technology's punctuated equilibrium, scavengers inherit market share when incumbents shed 'non-core' assets that later prove essential.