Lenovo Exec: We Are Surging In Workstation, Gaming, AR And Data Center

Lenovo is capturing major opportunities in a number of key growth areas with the help of channel partners, while future growth is likely to far surpass the results so far, Executive Vice President Kirk Skaugen told partners during Lenovo's Accelerate 2018 conference.

"Despite the fact that it was a transformation year for Lenovo, we hit a top line three-year growth high in the third quarter of $12.9 billion," Skaugen said, with more than 80 percent of revenue from North America coming from partners.

[Related: 10 Key Takeaways From Lenovo Accelerate 2018]

"What I can tell you is I think this year is going to put that to shame," he said during the partner conference in Las Vegas.

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In the company's PC and smart devices division, for two consecutive quarters Lenovo has been outpacing the market in revenue, Skaugen told partners. Gaming and workstations are now both $1 billion per year businesses for Lenovo, he said.

"I remember running the business at Intel and asking Lenovo, 'Can you please just join the workstation market?' We've now got $1 billion of workstation business. And that could be easily $2 billion here very, very quickly," Skaugen said, while Lenovo has become "the No. 1 gaming PC company in the world in units this year as well."

Meanwhile, Skaugen said he's aiming to prove that the data center business "is on an unstoppable growth trend," with every geography closing the recent quarter with double-digit revenue growth. Going forward, Lenovo expects "far greater than market growth" in data center, he said.

Additionally, "we are now the No. 1 augmented reality company in the world. We have 80 percent market share," Skaugen said, thanks to the debut last year of "Star Wars: Jedi Challenges," an augmented-reality game that runs on Lenovo's Mirage AR headset.

Lenovo also won more recognition at CES 2018 for non-PC devices than for PCs, with recognition for smart speakers, augmented reality and virtual reality, among other areas, he said. Lenovo has "really strong growth in new devices," Skaugen said.