Top Lenovo Exec Urges Partners To Focus On Top-Selling Products Amid Memory Crunch

In an interview with CRN, Lenovo North America President Ryan McCurdy talks about how partners can potentially protect customers from price increases before products are shipped and how a recent restructuring better positions the vendor for the memory shortage.

Lenovo North America President Ryan McCurdy is urging channel partners to prioritize the positioning of top-selling data center and PC products to help customers fight against mounting hardware costs in the face of the global memory shortage.

McCurdy made the request to partners in an interview with CRN last Wednesday, saying that the Chinese tech giant’s so-called “top-choice express” models for data center products and its “top-seller” client device products can give partners a potential edge against the risk that prices go up before products ship to customers.

“When the product ships is a key piece, so there’s an increasing call-to-action for us to focus more on these top-choice express models that we can offer, quote, get backlog and ship quickly, which is the best way for us to get the most competitive price and ship the fastest,” said McCurdy, who is also a senior vice president.

While mounting hardware costs have been largely driven by the global memory shortage, McCurdy said the source of such constraints—the ongoing AI data center buildout—has started to create supply issues for other components, including CPUs.

“I think this all just flows from this AI cycle, which is great. And having 72 percent year-over-year growth in our AI-related revenue shows that we’re participating in a big way,” he said.

“And our ability to use our supply chain across those major businesses to get access to supply, I think, is going to be a big differentiator for us as we move to close this fiscal year and move into next fiscal year,” McCurdy added.

As CRN reported, Lenovo North America Channel Chief Wade McFarland told partners in a Feb. 2 letter that orders for client device products should be placed by Wednesday to try to avoid price changes set for certain commercial models next month. He added that orders received by Saturday but not shipped by March 31 “will need to be repriced.”

For its Infrastructure Solutions Group, the company has limited price quote windows for Lenovo’s internal bidding platform to 14 days and the external bidding platform to 30 days, the channel chief added, but he warned that “these terms may change.” The latter platform can be used by all resellers, including distributors and solution providers.

McFarland also revealed that Lenovo has begun repricing some larger ISG deals and paused new customer bonus incentives for ISG transactions.

‘There’s No Way Around’ Ordering Policy Changes

In the interview with CRN, McCurdy called recent changes to ordering and pricing policies by Lenovo and other vendors unavoidable due to the component supply constraints.

“We’ve absolutely had to adjust and continue to adjust. There’s no way around it,” he said.

However, McCurdy said Lenovo 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.”

The company issued these policies, according to the executive, after it heard from partners during an advisory board meeting at CES 2026 in early January about the “need to meet more often because the [situation is] so dynamic and things are changing so quickly.”

“We’re in constant contact. Our relationships with the channel partners is a key differentiator, and they gave us this feedback that they appreciate how open and transparent we are, and so they have that information,” McCurdy said.

Why Customers Have To Order Fast: ‘It’s A Math Problem’

While Lenovo is asking partners to get orders from customers as fast as possible to avoid potential price hikes, McCurdy acknowledged that this request can conflict with the naturally slow procurement process of many such customers.

“It’s uncharted territory. In 25 years, I haven’t seen anything quite like this, even though we had COVID and we’ve had tariffs. We’ve had many, many supply disruptions,” said McCurdy, who worked at Intel for 23 years before joining Lenovo in 2023.

Nevertheless, the executive said, customers “need to make decisions quickly” if they are sensitive to price increases and have fixed budgets.

“They’re having to act quicker because the current environment is—it’s a math problem. There’s not enough product in the market to satisfy the demand, so the price continues to adjust to find equilibrium. So the only answer is acting quickly and/or finding ways to access more budget,” McCurdy said.

Lenovo is making this point with partners and customers often, he added.

“The longer customers wait and deliberate, the more the price goes up,” McCurdy said.

How Lenovo’s ISG Restructuring Is Helping It Navigate Memory Shortage

With his call for partners to focus on top-selling products for better pricing and faster ship times, McCurdy said this push is benefitting from Lenovo’s recent move to simplify its ISG portfolio as part of a restructuring it did for the data center business unit last quarter.

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.

“We’ve seen a lot of success with our top-choice express [data center products in ISG],” McCurdy said. “These are these purpose-built SKUs that are basically a subset of our total product offerings. And they ship faster, and they’re basically the sweet spot of what the mainstream customers are buying.”

This has allowed Lenovo to optimize its supply chain, which the executive called a “huge advantage” when compared to what’s required with a “more bespoke and more complex” set of products “that would have more challenges in the cost of the inputs and the ability to produce them at scale and ship them in the shortest lead time available.”

“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.