Exclusive: Lenovo Warns Partners Of Device Price Changes In March Amid Memory Crunch

Lenovo’s North America channel chief uses the warning to ask partners to ‘place orders as soon as possible’ to try to avoid next month’s pricing update for select commercial products in the Intelligent Devices Group portfolio, which includes PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Lenovo expects to make pricing changes to certain commercial client device products in early March due to the ongoing global memory chip shortage, the vendor’s North America channel chief warned partners earlier this month.

The channel chief, Wade McFarland (pictured above), made the warning in a Feb. 2 letter to partners regarding “certain products and configurations” in the commercial segment of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group (IDG) portfolio, which includes PCs, smartphones and tablets.

“The scope and impact of any updates will vary, and specific details will be communicated directly where applicable,” he wrote in the letter, which laid out how the memory shortage is impacting Lenovo’s ordering and pricing policies across IDG and its data center business unit, the Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG).

Lenovo provided a copy of the letter to CRN.

The memory shortage, caused by the ongoing AI data center buildout, has resulted in sharp cost increases for DRAM and NAND chips over the past few months across the industry. This has prompted OEMs, including Lenovo, HPE and Cisco, to warn of hardware price increases and revised ordering and pricing terms for partners.

“We’ve absolutely had to adjust and continue to adjust [terms]. There’s no way around it,” said Ryan McCurdy, Lenovo’s North America president, in a Wednesday interview with CRN. He added that the company has “laid out some very clear policies for how we will take orders for this quarter, how we will price orders and how we will honor timelines.”

Camden Haley, vice president of production management at Merrimack, N.H.-based Lenovo solution provider partner Connection, told CRN that he expects these pricing changes to result in higher prices for some commercial PCs next month.

But while the ordering policy changes by some OEMs have created consternation and uncertainty in the channel, Haley lauded Lenovo for providing a timeline on how partners can best avoid incoming price increases and for sticking to it.

“They’ve been giving us some good parameters to work within [so] that we can communicate and provide timelines ahead of certain things to our sellers [and] our customers,” he said.

“So far, they’ve been able to hold to that, where maybe some other OEMs have tried that, but then a week or two later they have to change, and then that requires [us] to re-educate our sellers and our customers,” Haley added.

Lenovo Sets Timeline To Help Partners Avoid Device Price Changes

In the partner letter, McFarland used the warning about client device pricing to ask partners to “place orders as soon as possible”—more specifically with distributors by Wednesday, Feb. 25—to try to avoid next month’s pricing update.

The deadline will give distributors time to submit orders to Lenovo by Saturday of next week, Feb. 28, according to the North America channel chief, who encouraged partners to work with Lenovo’s sellers to inform their joint customers.

As a result, orders received by Lenovo on or before Feb. 28 “are more likely to align with current pricing assumptions, subject to product availability and shipment timing,” according to McFarland. (The original letter said “orders received to Lenovo later than February 28, 2026, are more likely to align with current pricing assumptions,” but a Lenovo spokesperson told CRN that this was a mistake and should have said “no later than.”)

However, McFarland said, “Orders received by Lenovo before Feb. 28, 2026, but not shipped by March 31, 2026, will need to be repriced.”

“Pricing is influenced by both order timing and fulfillment timing, and Lenovo reviews pricing periodically in response to evolving market conditions,” he wrote.

The CEO for a top Lenovo partner, who did not want to be identified, said the Lenovo letter gives the vendor an “out” to raise prices on any orders not shipped by March 31.

“They’re saying, ‘We’ll take your order, but we might not be able to ship it and if we can’t ship it we are going to reprice it,’” said the CEO. “It gives them a total out.”

“What they are saying is if you really want the product we are going to have to charge you more,” added the CEO, who said he is nevertheless “sympathetic” about the situation OEMs are in. “That is what they are saying without saying it. Clearly, they got this validated from the legal folks to protect themselves. We understand that.”

Lenovo’s ISG Pauses New Customer Discounts, Reprices Some Deals

As for Lenovo’s ISG unit, which includes servers and storage products, McFarland said in the partner letter that price quote windows have been limited to 14 days for Lenovo’s internal bidding platform and 30 days for the external bidding platform, the latter of which can be used by all resellers, including distributors and solution providers.

However, he noted that “these terms may change as we continue to navigate market volatility.”

The Noth America channel chief also admitted that ISG “has started repricing select deals as needed, both in backlog and quoting stages.” But, he added, this has only impacted a small number of deals on the larger side that are “most impacted by these cost increases.”

“We will continue to partner with you and keep you informed if your customers are affected in advance,” McFarland wrote.

He reminded partners that Lenovo temporarily paused new customer bonus nominations for ISG deals on Jan. 26. Also known as “Mission Acquisition,” this initiative provides up-front discounts for partners who win Lenovo deals with new customers.

Bob Venero, founder and CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Lenovo partner Future Tech Enterprise, said he does not understand why Lenovo is pausing the ISG new customer bonus partner incentive in the wake of the memory supply crisis.

“Why would you shut down a new customer bonus to partners who may take this opportunity to drive more business to you?” he asked. “That makes zero sense to me. I would be enticing partners to go out and shift business from OEMs that can’t deliver whereas maybe Lenovo could.”

“To me this is very shortsighted,” Venero added. “If I am a competing OEM, I would double down on the new bonus incentive to take share away from Lenovo.”

Lenovo Exec: ISG Restructuring A ‘Huge Advantage’ Amid Supply Issues

McCurdy, Lenovo’s North America president, told CRN that the company’s move to simplify its ISG portfolio—which was done as part of a restructuring Lenovo did for the data center business unit last quarter—is giving it a “huge advantage” amid the memory shortage.

That’s because Lenovo has reduced the number of models and complexity of models in its ISG portfolio to focus on products with more common components that the company can offer customers at “the best cost points and the best availability with supply chain ship dates that meet their needs,” according to the executive.

“When you have a supply chain that’s optimized and has consistency of models, this is a huge advantage versus something maybe more bespoke and more complex that would have more challenges in the cost of the inputs and also the ability to procure them at scale and ship them in the shortest lead time available,” McCurdy said.

“A lot of the feedback we get is we want to be more agile and quick to quote, quick to commit and quick to ship at the best price value. And we’re seeing a lot of momentum because those SKUs meet that value proposition,” he added.

Steven Burke contributed to this story.