Lenovo this week announced its most recent quarterly earnings. Of particular note, the firm saw its best PC sales growth in four years.

“Personal Computers and Smart Devices reported $7.7 billion in [quarterly] revenue, up 16 percent from the same period a year earlier and the highest growth in four years,” Lenovo noted. “For the year, [this part of the business] reported $32.4 billion [in revenues], up 8 percent from [the prior fiscal year].”

So that’s good news. And it’s interesting to me on two levels.

First, we’re always looking for any signs of life in the PC market. And with this market showing small gains in each of the past two quarters, the question is whether we’re seeing a bottoming-out, or leveling-off, of what had been a years-long sales free-fall. Or whether, as I suspect, we’re hitting a one-time bump based around Windows 10 upgrades to corporations that we may later view as the PC’s last stand.

Secondly, Lenovo was once the world’s biggest maker of PCs, but it has fallen behind HP in recent years. As such, the firm has recast itself as a “three-way” company and not just a PC maker. So in addition to PCs, it has major focuses on data center computing and mobile computing.

Each of those businesses grew in Lenovo’s most recent quarter. But the PC part of the business remains Lenovo’s biggest, and by a wide margin. For example, Lenovo earned as many revenues in this past quarter as it did in mobile for the entire fiscal year.

So it perhaps interesting to see Lenovo beating the same drum as Microsoft: It focused on marketing the future while it’s actually still making most of its money on the past.

“Lenovo’s vision has long been to become a global leader in intelligent transformation,” chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing said. “We will focus on building competitiveness in Smart IoT devices, data center infrastructure, and vertical intelligent solution, and we are well positioned to take advantage of smart IoT and intelligence era.”

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