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Lenovo Group, the world’s fastest growing major PC company, on Wednesday announced that it is acquiring Germany’s Medion AG, a leading supplier of various PC and consumer electronics products. The acquisition will double Lenovo’s market share in Germany and make it the third-largest PC company in Europe’s largest PC market.

“This agreement represents another bold move for Lenovo to realize its long-term strategy. It will complement both Lenovo's core PC business and new businesses which are key areas for development. With their strong consumer sales, marketing, services and retail capabilities, Medion’s business is perfectly aligned with our consumer growth strategy in Western Europe,” said Yang Yuanqing, chief executive officer of Lenovo.

Together, the combined company will have more than 14% share in the German PC market and approximately 7.5% share in the Western Europe PC market. This agreement also fuels Lenovo’s expansion in consumer PCs and the high-growth mobile Internet market. The combined companies are also looking to realize the benefits of collaboration, global scale, cost savings and increased synergies in the areas of procurement, global supply chain, software development, distribution channels and product and business model innovation.

Chief executive officer of Nokia Corp. denied that there are talks between the phone giant and Microsoft Corp. over potential acquisition of Nokia's hardware business unit by the software developer. The head of the company stresses that the two companies are currently working hard to improve Windows Phone operating system and make it competitive against Android and iOS.

"We will remain in possession of the hardware business. The rumors are baseless. It doesn't make sense when you think about it. Look at the synergies between the companies -- if you sell, you destroy value in the process," said Stephen Elop, chief executive officer of Nokia, at the All Things Digital 2011 conference.

The head of Nokia once again reaffirmed plans to release the company's first smartphone based on Windows Phone platform in the fourth quarter of this year. He admitted that Nokia will need to differentiate its phones from similar devices made by HTC or Samsung, but stressed that the main competitors for Nokia at present are Apple iOS and Google Android eco-systems. The head of the largest mobile phone maker on the globe also admitted that in order to fight the Android and iOS eco-systems, the company will need other manufacturers of WP-based handsets to be successful too, as it attracts software developers to the operating system in general. In general, Nokia will have to find the balance between its differentiation and ensuring that all of the features it can implement into the Windows Phone platform also work on others' handsets.

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored.  Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation.  We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

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