Surprise! Lenovo is World's Third Largest Smartphone Vendor

The No. 1 PC maker is also No. 3 in smartphone sales

Life is good for Lenovo. The OEM figured out the secret formula for thriving in a technological landscape that finds itself in a midst of a transitory phase, and as such, it grew its desktop PC shipments last quarter by 1 percent when the industry averaged a 6 percent decline. Laptop sales went up 8 percent, and as for the mobile handset sector, Lenovo is now the world's third largest smartphone vendor.

Part of Lenovo's "PC Plus" strategy entails focusing on the mobile market while continuing to dominate in traditional PC sales. As a result, Lenovo is the world's largest PC supplier and the third largest vendor of smartphones, the latter of which is the result of increasing its smartphone sales to 12.9 million units in the third quarter of 2013, according to data released by Gartner. That's an 85 percent year-over-year bump.

Out of the more than 455 million smartphones shipped in Q3, Samsung led the way with 80.3 million units, followed by Apple at 30.3 million. With Lenovo's rise to No. 3, LG was bumped down to fourth place with 12 million units, followed by Huawei (11.6 million) and all others.

In terms of platform dominance, Android is found on nearly 82 percent of the world's smartphones. Google's open source OS is crushing every other contender, including iOS (No. 2), which is way back in Lenovo's rear-view mirror with a slightly better than 12 percent share of the market.