Lenovo said Thursday it would pay $2.3 billion for IBM’s low-end server business, successfully concluding a deal that had fizzled a year earlier after the two parties failed to agree on a price.
Lenovo said it would settle the transaction with $2 billion in cash and the balance in its own Hong Kong-listed shares. About 7,500 IBM employees in locations including Raleigh, N.C., Shanghai and Shenzhen in China, and Taipei, Taiwan, were expected to be offered employment by Lenovo, the Chinese company said in a statement.
‘‘With the right strategy, great execution, continued innovation and a clear commitment to the x86 industry, we are confident that we can grow this business successfully for the long-term, just as we have done with our worldwide PC business,’’ Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement, referring to the server industry.
Early last year, Lenovo and IBM were in negotiations about the unit, which includes IBM’s x86 server business. At the time, Lenovo valued the unit at about $2.5 billion, while IBM wanted at least $4 billion.
IBM restarted talks with interested parties recently.
Dell and Fujitsu were among the other bidders.
But because Lenovo had already taken a close look at the business last year, it was able to quickly make an offer that IBM was comfortable with.
Lenovo bought IBM’s ThinkPad personal computer business in 2005 for $1.75 billion.
In the years since then, the Chinese company has overtaken HP and Dell to become the world’s biggest manufacturer of PCs.
The server unit being sold has estimated revenues of about $5 billion a year, but IBM does not break out sales for the division, which has lower margins than its software and services businesses.
With a sale of the division, IBM continues its transformation from primarily a hardware producer to a provider of services and software for businesses and governments.
‘‘This divestiture allows IBM to focus on system and software innovations that bring new kinds of value to strategic areas of our business, such as cognitive computing, Big Data and cloud,’’ Steve Mills, senior vice president at IBM Software and Systems, said in a statement.
For Lenovo, based in China, acquiring the server business is expected to help it weather the slow decline in its core personal computer business. Lenovo is also expanding into tablets and smartphones as it tries to tap into rising consumer demand for mobile devices.
In China, Lenovo is already the second-largest smartphone brand, after Samsung, and it has announced plans for a push into the United States smartphone market this year.
David Gelles reported from New York.
