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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Next year, Microsoft will buy Lenovo for $22 billion.

It will nicely round out Microsoft's already expansive Xbox+Surface+Lumia hardware division with a full range of PCs and x86 servers.

Perhaps more pressingly, the deal will also ensure that the only growing PC maker stays in Microsoft's camp and abandons its flirtations with Android...

The last remains of Motorola Mobility will be dissolved into the MS division that was formerly Nokia Mobile Devices, completing a surreal cycle of acquisitions.

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I think you can be pretty sure that no company will buy Lenovo. Not only because it's big and expensive but because it's a chinese company. It's one of chinas gateways into the western market. The government won't let someone buy Lenovo, for sure. If someone buys a company it will be Lenovo, increasing its portfolio and pushing into US and european markets.

Chinese companies are not off limits for purchase. They just need to mature a bit, become more sophisticated, and distance themselves from their repressive government. After that, the suitors will come.

How much more mature should a company become that owns IBMs hardware business and one of the oldest and the most renowned mobile companys. How much more mature as "largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world" (which is Huawei)?

A US company will never buy such a company. What happened in the past was them creating Joint Ventures with western companys or buying them straight away to get into other markets.

It's just too much of chinas next step after manufacturing the low cost goods of the world, to create the high-tech as well. And of course to sell it to you and me. And that's politics as much as economics.

Even if you were right, this will not happen in a couple of years. It certainly won't happen on the watch of current Chinese leadership, their plan to "move up" in the production chain being quite clear and well-known.

They are off limits for purchase if the Chinese government does not want to allow them to be sold, is the point. If the government sees them as strategic means of growing China's technology sector, good luck.

AFAIK, foreigners can't legally own a Chinese telecoms corporation at all.

> distance themselves from their repressive government

How does one do that, short of changing the government?

Lenovo is a bit more than 10% indirectly owned by the Chinese government. I don't think they would ever agree to such an acquisition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Ownership

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