Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to Lenovo's Investor Earnings webcast. This is Jenny Lai, Vice President of Investor Relations at Lenovo. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Before we start, let me introduce our management team joining the call today: Mr. Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo's Chairman and CEO; Mr. Wong Wai Ming, Group CFO; Mr. Ken Wong, President of Solutions and Services Group; Mr. Kirk Skaugen, President of Infrastructure Solutions Group; Mr. Luca Rossi, President of Intelligent Devices Group; and Mr. Sergio Buniac, President of Mobile Business Group and President of Motorola. We will begin with earnings presentations, and shortly after that, we'll open the call for questions. Now, let me turn it over to Yuanqing. Yuanqing, please.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Last year, the world faced multiple challenges, including supply shortages, pandemic disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, and higher inflation. Yet, we successfully overcame these challenges and delivered a record year with historic revenue and profitability improvements. All our main businesses are profitable, and our new growth engines are positioned for even stronger success. The digital and intelligent transformation trend continues to accelerate. IDC reports that more than 50% of enterprises now have digitalization as a part of their corporate strategy. The hybrid work model is here to stay, creating strong demand not only for smart devices and data center infrastructure, but also for scenario-driven solutions such as smart collaboration, smart home, and smart office. Guided by our clear strategy, we captured these opportunities to deliver all-time record fiscal year profit and revenue for the group.
For the first time, net income reached $2 billion, up 72% year-on-year. Revenue also improved by $10 billion for the second year in a row, reaching $71 billion, crossing the $70 billion milestone. All main businesses are now profitable for the first time since the Motorola Mobile and the IBM x86 acquisitions, with particularly strong growth momentum in our mobile infrastructure and solutions and the services businesses. At the same time, we continued to strengthen our competitiveness to drive sustainable, profitable growth. We made strong progress towards doubling R&D investments within three years from fiscal year 2021-2022, up 43% year-on-year last year. We continued to realize our ESG goals and commitments. Now, I will talk about each of our businesses. Let's start with the SSG, Solutions and Services Group.
The trillion-dollar IT services market continues to expand. With the hybrid work model, the demand for digital workplace services is expected to reach $93 billion by 2025. Also, our studies show more than 90% of CIOs are willing to consider adopting as-a-service offerings. In the last year, SSG captured these opportunities and delivered high growth and high profitability. Revenue reached an all-time record, up 13% year-on-year. Operating margin was 22%. We saw strong double-digit growth across all segments, especially managed service revenue, which grew more than 60%, with strong growth from our TruScale as-a-service business. Now, revenue from managed service and project and solution services accounts for almost half of our SSG business. SSG continued to invest in software tools, platforms, and repeatable vertical solutions with our own IP.
We are driving deeper into our vertical solution capabilities in key industries, focusing on manufacturing, retail, healthcare, education, and smart cities. We continued to expand our TruScale as-a-service to broader digital workplace solutions and develop our hybrid cloud solutions. In the meantime, we are further exploring metaverse solutions based on our current foundation. Our Infrastructure Solutions Group, or ISG, continues to benefit from ICT infrastructure upgrades. The data center market is expected to reach $183 billion by 2025. The Edge infrastructure market alone is expected to exceed $41 billion. The hybrid cloud market will exceed $120 billion. With data creation expected to nearly double by 2025 from 2022, the opportunities for data processing and storage will continue to expand rapidly.
Last year, ISG reached an important milestone, becoming profitable over the full year, with revenue up more than 13% year-on-year to a new record. All high-value businesses, such as storage, software, services, and high-performance computing, set revenue records. We continued to grow at a premium to the market by enhancing our full stack of capabilities that cover both CSPs, cloud service providers, and the enterprise and SMB segments. We continued to invest in in-house design and manufacturing capabilities, while also expanding into fast-growing areas, including Edge and cloud services. We further differentiated with green technology, such as our Neptune liquid cooling system. For our Intelligent Devices Group, or IDG, smart devices continue to benefit from the hybrid work model. While consumer PC demand may slow in the short term, commercial demand remains strong.
The smart collaboration market is expected to surpass $80 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, the challenges we have faced in the recent past won't disappear right away. By overcoming challenges while capturing opportunities, IDG delivered a fantastic fiscal year, with revenue exceeding $60 billion for the first time, up 18% year-on-year. Operating profit improved by almost $1 billion. We maintained the number one position in PCs as the premier segments delivered high double-digit growth. Our mobile business revenue outgrew the market by 30 points, with operating profit doubling to more than $360 million, a record since the Motorola acquisition. We are expanding beyond PCs, and now over 18% of IDG revenue comes from other smart devices, embedded computing, IoT, and scenario-based solutions.
Meanwhile, we continued to focus on innovation, particularly in premier segments, to extend our leading position in PC, while maintaining industry-leading profitability. We further expanded beyond PC devices, IoT, and scenario-based solutions to provide new growth engines as we move from computers to computing. Let me also cover our fourth-quarter performance. Despite the disruption to supply and production due to the COVID-19 outbreak in China, we still managed to close the year with strong results. Our net income achieved more than 50% year-on-year improvement for the seventh consecutive quarter. Our revenue grew nearly 7%. All three business groups contributed to our profitable growth. SSG revenue grew 28% and improved the operating margin by over a point. ISG sustained profitability for the second quarter, and IDG improved the operating margin for the 18th consecutive quarter.
Lastly, there's one particular message I want to share with you. Years of our persistent investment and efforts in infrastructure and mobile businesses have paid off. They have not only turned profitable, but also become our new growth engines, along with SSG. We will capture these windows of opportunity and drive the entire company to new heights. At the same time, we will continue to decisively invest in innovation, service-led transformation, and ESG for continued success. While the world continues to face uncertainty, we will stay flexible and resilient. We will execute our clear strategy, compete with the unique advantage of global local model, and the balance between innovation and efficiency. We are confident to overcome challenges while capturing opportunities to deliver sustainable profitable growth in the future. Thank you. Now, let me turn it over to our CFO, Wai Ming. Wai Ming, please.
Thank you, Yuanqing. I will now take you through Lenovo's financial and operational performance in fiscal year 2022 and Q4. For the 2022 fiscal year, our group delivered another historic year with new milestones in profit and revenue. The group revenue exceeded $70 billion for the first time in company history and grew 18%, adding $10 billion for the second consecutive year. Profit attributable to equity holders increased 72% to $2 billion, and basic earnings per share came in at $0.1745. This represents an 83% year-on-year growth, a strong accomplishment in a year impacted by severe supply chain and logistical disruptions. Group net income margin improved 89 basis points year-on-year, on track to achieving our target of doubling net margin in three years.
Our growth trajectory remains strong and well-supported by structural trends such as digital transformation, increasing complexity in cloud infrastructure, and customer preference for value-added solutions. A balanced growth profile underscores the group's business strengths. It is worth noting our growth beyond PC, including our successful turnaround of the infrastructure business and strong expansion in smartphones and services. We achieved consistent growth across all three business groups and geographical markets, except Asia-Pacific, due to a slowdown in education sales relative to the high base last year. ISG turned profitable for the first time since our acquisition of the IBM x86 business. Both SSG and IDG contributed to another successful year with double-digit revenue increase and profit expansion. Today, the board declared a final dividend of HKD 0.30 per share.
Taking into consideration the interim dividend of HKD 0.08 per share, the total dividend will be HKD 0.38 per share for fiscal year 2022. Now, let me shift gears to talk about our R&D investments. We made a commitment to double our R&D investment in three years. In fiscal year 2022, the group's R&D spending grew 43% year-on-year. Digital transformation has never been more important to our growth as we invest in new IT architecture spending across client, edge, cloud, network, and intelligence. Our investments will push the development of high-value-added products and key components, including edge, storage, and cloud, in response to significant growth in data creation and data consumption. We will also drive innovation to propel our smartphone portfolio, scenario-based solutions, ESG initiatives, and expand our services scope.
Every aspect of our R&D investment has contributed to the 71 basis points increase in our record operating margin and long-term competitiveness. In fiscal year 2022, our operating cash flow further increased to $4.1 billion, improving over four consecutive years to a record level. Free cash flow reached $2.8 billion. These results were achieved through strong profit expansion and prudent working capital management, while balancing between generating cash and maintaining competitiveness in response to industry-wide challenges in supply and logistics. Our strength in cash flow management was maintained throughout the fourth fiscal quarter. Operating cash flow more than doubled to nearly $1.5 billion, while free cash flow tripled to $1.1 billion. To optimize our capital structure, the group further reduced net debt by $1.5 billion and financing costs by 18% during the year.
Including the repurchase of perpetual securities, we cut net debt by a total of $3.5 billion in the last four years and achieved net cash for consecutive quarters. It's worth noting that not only did a major rating agency grant Lenovo a credit rating upgrade during the year, but Lenovo was also added to the Hang Seng Index as a constituent stock. SSG closed its first year of business with operating profit up by 40% year-on-year, as operating margin widened to 22%. Revenue increased by 30% to $5.4 billion, growing much faster than the industry average. Our recurring revenue base continued to build as our deferred revenue grew by 30% year-on-year. SSG's solid performance was supported by the strength in its three business segments, among which support services revenue rose 23% year-on-year.
Its revenue reached an all-time high of $7.1 billion, up 13% year-over-year, despite supply constraints of semiconductor parts. The business also turned profitable for the first time since the IBM x86 acquisition. ISG operating profit increased by $137 million year-over-year. In Q4, the COVID lockdown in Shenzhen added further pressure on our supply chain, affecting ISG revenue growth. Despite the unprecedented supply impact, ISG was again profitable in this fiscal quarter and reported a year-over-year profit expansion of $36 million, highlighting its strength in weathering challenges to drive profitability. ISG expanded its client base through a broadened portfolio of product offerings that particularly appeal to next-wave customers in the CSP business who are in need of strong supply support to expand their own cloud services. CSP revenue grew 20% in the year, thanks to design wins in next-gen products.
ESMB revenue was up 7% year-on-year as the business expanded high-growth, high-margin solutions across servers, storage, SDI, software, and services, and captured emerging opportunities in AI-powered edge and hybrid cloud. IDG delivered another record year in performance. Its revenue and operating profit grew 18% and 27% year-on-year respectively to all-time highs. IDG added $9.3 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2022, a strong achievement considering the scale of its business. These results were achieved despite multiple challenges, including supply constraints, weakness in the education segment, and the ongoing pandemic. IDG Group continued to be the leader in the global PC sector by both market share and profits. The business is investing in innovations and cultivating strong commercial demand from the hybrid work model. Premium products continue to enjoy high double-digit sales growth as premium commercial sales grew 30%-60% year-on-year.
While sales among premium consumers were up 30-37%, we also extended our innovation in the ESG area, including increased use of recycled materials and sustainable packaging. IDG also made significant progress beyond PC, including other smart devices, embedded computing, and scenario-based solutions. These delivered a combined revenue growth of 26% and accounted for 18% of IDG revenue in fiscal year 2022. The success of IDG's adjacent products is becoming an increasingly important profit contributor as smartphone sales increased 39% year-on-year with double operating profits. Sales of smart collaboration solutions also grew nearly triple digits year-on-year on the back of strong customer demand, although off a low base. In Q4, IDG achieved a solid 14% profit expansion. Its operating margin grew to 7.7% with profitability increasing year-on-year over 18 consecutive quarters.
Q4 was a quarter of strong performance with 58% hyper-growth in net profits. The global supply shortage of semiconductors persisted while COVID lockdowns impacted the operations of our Shenzhen factory. Despite these challenges, our revenue grew by 7%, and all business groups reported strong profit improvements. SSG continued to post double-digit growth in both revenue and profitability, clear evidence of its ability to increase service penetration and capitalize on its massive installed hardware base. ISG was profitable for two consecutive quarters with an operating profit improvement of $36 million year-on-year. IDG maintained high profitability thanks to its focus strategy in driving growth in segments where demand is strong, including premium and commercial segments, as well as opportunities beyond PC.
IDG's smartphone business continued its record-breaking performance in focus markets and reached a double-digit market share for the first time in North America since the acquisition of Motorola. On the ESG front, Lenovo achieved a CDP score of A for supplier engagement rating in climate change. We are also listed on the Supplier Engagement Rating Leaderboard, an honor we have maintained since 2018. Lenovo was included in the 2022 Bloomberg Gender Equality Index. As a global technology leader, gender equality is a top priority of our social impact efforts. We've set several ambitious goals to enhance gender diversity, including increasing the female representation of our executive population by 7 percentage points over five years to 27% by the fiscal year ending March 2026.
On governance, Lenovo received its highest-ever rating and the best overall industry score for the IT industry in the 2021 Hang Seng Corporate Sustainability Index, achieving a AA+ rating for the first time. It is also the first time we received the 2022 Asia-Pacific top-rated ESG performer rating by Sustainalytics. We are making every effort to improve our supply chain practices by completing the initial ESG risk screening of over 500 suppliers with an EcoVadis rating tool. Looking ahead, the group will continue to operate with a larger purpose in mind as it anticipates the technology and innovation needs of a smarter future. While the external environment remains challenging, the strategic opportunities in digital and service-led transformations should accelerate, filling commercial demand for Lenovo's end-to-end, user-friendly product and service solutions.
Our clear strategy and execution, coupled with committed R&D investment and a solid global/local franchise, are key to achieving our medium-term goal of doubling net margin. SSG is a new and well-established growth engine for the group. With its rising scale and strong profitability, structural opportunities will emerge from digitalization and post-pandemic changes in the workplace. This shift will increase the demand for premier TruScale as a service, sustainability, and vertical solutions. SSG will continue to broaden its service offering in this area while strengthening channel tools and cooperation with business partners. With our goal to sustain a double-digit growth trajectory, we will actively seek business opportunities to broaden and deepen the geographical and vertical coverage of our services, especially through managed, project, and solution services. With strengthened customer relationships, SSG will further enhance its financial contribution to the group.
The outlook remains strong in ISG as the COVID-led supply shortfall has resulted in unfulfilled customer orders as customers accelerate infrastructure upgrades. ISG has built industry-leading end-to-end infrastructure solutions and expanded from servers to full-stack offerings, including storage, SDI, software, and services. For the ESMB segment, ISG will expand its portfolio for higher profitability. The group will also capitalize on growth opportunities in AI-powered edge, hybrid cloud, high-performance computing, and solutions for the telco communication sectors. For the CSP segment, the group has a unique ODM-plus business model to address growing customer demand. The business will continue to diversify its customer base and expand its share of existing accounts through design wins. IDG will lead the global race in device innovation by enhancing features for hybrid working, gaming, entertainment, green materials, and ESG designs.
Meanwhile, the total available market of the global PC sector should remain at a level higher than the pre-pandemic period, thanks to strong commercial demand from the hybrid work model. The smartphone business will focus on portfolio expansion and differentiation to take advantage of accelerated 5G adoption and the changing competitive landscape. IDG will accelerate investment to score wins in new growth engines, a move that has become more important for growth. This includes fast-growing accessories and scenario-based solutions. Our strong financial position provides a solid foundation on which Lenovo can proactively pursue long-term growth opportunities. In the short term, we face headwinds from slowing economic growth and the ongoing pandemic. The entire industry has been impacted by unpredictable developments, which will affect supply and demand.
Nevertheless, we will continue to leverage our operational excellence and pursue innovations to grow faster than the industry and expand our new business opportunities. Finally, as always, we remain committed to driving sustainable growth and profitability for our shareholders. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Wai Ming. Now we are opening the line for questions, and this session will be in English only. Please be reminded to limit yourself to two questions at a time. Operator, I will now turn it over to you. Please give us your instructions.
To submit a question, please type the question in the Q&A box on the right and click submit.
Thank you. Now we have our first question from Desmond Lim from Eastspring. What is the impact of the lockdown in China on both the production and revenue sides? We would like to invite our chairman, Yang Yuanqing, to comment. Yang Yuanqing, we couldn't hear you.
While we are waiting, perhaps another executive would like to share the insight on this question.
Hello?
Yes.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Oh.
We can hear you now.
Thank you. Thank you, yeah, thank you, Desmond, for your question. Definitely. The lockdown in China has a certain impact on demand and the supply chain. On the demand side, we do see some short-term impact, particularly on commercial PCs. In consumer PCs, the impact is less because when people stay at home, they need a PC to work or to study. For Lenovo, we have a very balanced portfolio across geographies. We think the rest of the world will offset China's loss. That's about the demand.
Regarding of the supply, it indeed brings a certain uncertainty. We have tried to mitigate. Lockdown are really not new. It's something our industry and others around the world have navigated for the past 2 years. If you recall back to the early days of the global pandemic, it was cities and factories in China that were hardest hit first. We learned from those experience which have helped us mitigate and minimize impact for the similar situation. Lenovo's supply chain has always been a core strength of our company, as demonstrated by our business results. Our unique global manufacturing footprint across 35 markets is very helpful.
Our hybrid manufacturing model of in-house and ODM is helpful. Definitely our operational excellence are flexible and resilient will continue to help us overcome these challenges. Also the good news is that we are seeing some cities, including China, losing restrictions. While we will still see some short-term impact in the market, we remain confident about the long-term opportunities even in China. Thank you.
Thank you, Yuanqing. Now we move to question two, a follow-up question from Desmond Lim of Eastspring. Given good cash flow generation, what is the intention of the management? Will management be considering increasing dividends, buybacks or other opportunities for M&A and investments?
Wai Ming should answer the question. Wai Ming.
Okay. Thank you, Jenny. Desmond, it's Wai Ming from CFO. We obviously, I think doing the leveraging over the last couple of quarters very successfully. You can see that, I think the leverage we have, I think compared with the cash, we actually end up with net cash position for the last two quarters. I think insofar as the cash is concerned, I think we'll continue to deploy the cash to drive the profitable growth of the company. I think that also include, I think, at a time when it is appropriate, I think we will do, I think, the appropriate share buyback. If there are some, I think, if we actually see the share price, which obviously is significantly deviate from the value. There are
If you recall, we actually have a medium-term target of doubling our net margin. I think in the first year, we already achieved 0.9%. We obviously will continue to use the cash to drive growth, both organic and inorganic. More importantly, I think, is to invest in R&D for innovation, so that we will continue to maintain sustainable growth. Thank you.
Thank you, Wai Ming. Now we move to question number 3, Grace Chen from UBS. Her question is, can management share Lenovo's view on the PC industry's growth for 2022 and 2023? And how does this forecast change versus the company's prior forecast? There's been some recent concern. This should be a follow-up question. That's on server order cuts, a rumor in the market. And has Lenovo seen order cuts from cloud service providers? And could you share your view on the server market for this year? Those are two questions from Grace.
Good. Can Luca answer the first part and Kirk answer the second part?
Yeah. Thank you, Yang Yuanqing. Hopefully you can all hear me, okay.
Yes, fine.
Thanks, Grace, for this great question. I think it helps to clarify our view on this matter. We are certainly confident in the long-term outlook of our device business. It's largely positive. Digital life for consumers and digital transformation, hybrid work for commercial, will be key drivers for the total available market increase. As a data point, we also think there is a potential of between 300 and 400 million agent devices more than 4 years in the commercial space, which are due for replacement. Meanwhile, the AUR with more premium devices, which are being demanded by the customer to improve their digital life experience, is also helping with the revenue part.
Now, in the consumer segment, despite some weakness in the low end, particularly Chromebooks, but maybe not only Chromebooks at this moment, we believe that the premium and gaming segments will continue to do reasonably well. For both consumer and commercial, we are also increasing the penetration rate of our services so that they can contribute to better profitability and an improved customer experience. Now, in the short term, we certainly recognize some of the macro headwinds. Macro headwinds, IC shortages, the manufacturing shutdown in China in the short term, certain demand slowdowns, and geopolitical tension. All these factors are weighing on demand in the short term, but that is more so in the consumer segment.
When I look at the commercial demand, as of now, we still see strong demand and with good visibility for the full year. Our order portfolio is growing, and we also expect to end the quarter with a significant backlog in commercial. At the end of the day, we remain positive in the long term, particularly given our focus on innovation, our best-in-class portfolio, and our historically strong execution. We are confident we will continue to grow at a premium to the market. We are also focusing on adjacencies, accessories, visuals, and security software—several areas with high growth potential and also good or higher-than-average margins.
To conclude, let me add that we have already extended beyond the point where over 80% of IDG revenue comes from mobile phones. We are particularly proud of our mobile phone performance, as you have seen from the data, with 30 points of premium to market and triple-digit profit growth since acquisition. We are very confident about that. We are also working to expand revenue in the smart collaboration area, where we recorded triple-digit growth. I think despite some short-term weaknesses in the PC market, we are confident we will navigate it very well, better than our competitors. Thank you, Grace.
This is Kirk.
Kirk.
President of Infrastructure Solutions Group. I will answer the question on servers. As you heard from Wai Wai and Wai Ming, the last fiscal year we hit records in nearly every piece of our business. We do not see a slowdown or cancellations from our cloud service providers. We believe our ODM plus model with integrated board and system manufacturing is a superior model, and we believe that the revenue growth and backlog are at an all-time high. Our orders and new orders are at an all-time high. We're expanding from supporting 8 of the top 10 global clouds to now also having sales coverage for 500 of the next wave hyperscalers that we believe will become the next multi-billion-dollar companies in the world.
As you heard Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo is unique in that we have edge to cloud. Our new ThinkEdge offering provides the ability for retailers, manufacturing, healthcare, and others to deliver an edge-to-cloud infrastructure. This is also helping pull through demand for our edge products as well as the cloud. Relative to demand, we agree with the industry analysts; there will be high single-digit growth as a compound annual growth rate, and we are confident Lenovo will execute at a premium to market. Beyond that, our profitability should improve. As I've said in previous calls, we're expanding beyond Intel into AMD and Arm. We're expanding into storage in addition to servers. All of these infrastructure pieces are helping our profitability as well. Thank you.
Thank you, Kirk. Thank you, Luca. Our next question is coming from Howard Kao from Morgan Stanley. Given the current macro backdrop, a lot of companies are slowing down their hiring, particularly tech companies. When you talk to your clients in the U.S., do you get a sense that they are still thinking about reducing their CapEx budget? For your Chinese clients, there is an additional factor, which is the lockdowns on COVID. Any color on how they are thinking regarding their CapEx budget now versus a few months ago?
Yes. As I mentioned, in the past year, while we continued to focus on efficiency, we also invested more in innovation and R&D. We actually added more headcount on the technology side, in R&D. We added 5,000 people to focus on innovation in our new IT structure: client, edge, cloud, network, and intelligence. I think from a long-term point of view, it will contribute to our sustainable growth and profitability improvements. Definitely.
We will adjust our plan based on the market situation and our sales performance. We see that the market situation is challenging in both China and the rest of the world. We will make a detailed plan based on that. Thank you.
Thank you, Yang Yuanqing. We have our next question from Isaac Wong of eFusion Capital. His question is, "Your smartphone revenue and profit outperformed the market significantly. May I know what the possible reasons for this outperformance are? Do you foresee this outperformance continuing?"
Yeah, I think Sergio Buniac is online, right? Would you like to answer the question?
Yes. Hi. Hello, everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. I think it's a combination of market expansion and a better mix. If you look at our volumes, we grew around 5%. Our revenues grew 27%. Our profitability tripled in fiscal Q4. When you look by market, we see growth coming from all markets. Latin America grew by almost 10%, North America by 56%, Europe by 20%, and Asian markets by triple digits. We are also seeing a much better mix. You see the revenue growing faster than the units. We expect both to continue to grow. Our AS-ARs were higher. Our mix of 5G was higher.
In terms of mix, our Moto Edge, which is our premium franchise, grew by 600% from a smaller base. Our 4G Moto G mid-tier grew by 50%, and our Moto E by 30%. We are seeing growth on the more premium side of the market. We are also now leveraging the Lenovo footprint to grow in new segments like commercial. We expect that to continue in Q1 and through the year. We expect to continue to grow in all geographies, premium to market, and in all segments of the market.
Thank you, Sergio. The next question is coming from Mr. Conor O'Mara from Jefferies. His question is, SSG this quarter is already roughly 22% of profit and 8% of sales. As part of your transformation plan, do you have any target for SSG as a percentage of sales and profit? How about ISG?
Ken, could you please answer the first question?
Yeah, Yang Yuanqing.
Kirk for the second.
Yeah, Yang Yuanqing. Thank you, Mr. Conor O'Mara. I think this is a good question. You know, we have seen our customers becoming increasingly dependent on new IT technology to support their digital transformation and improve their business performance, right? In our experience, I think the demand for IT services is pretty resilient regardless of the economic cycle, right? I would even argue that in a challenging economic cycle, the demand for IT services is even higher because this is about how to leverage technology to build a competitive edge and be more customer-centric. That's why I think our view is still optimistic about the growth of IT services. Now, if you look at our last fiscal year's performance for SSG, I think it was a great year.
I think Wai Ming and YY shared early on. The SSG revenue on a year-to-year basis, we were able to grow at 30% year-to-year, and maintain a relatively high margin, right? Both the revenue growth and the profitability are above the Lenovo Group average, right? With that, I think for the new year, we'll continue to see good demand in the market. Our customer project is still planning for spending more in terms of IT services, right? Hopefully, we can maintain, you know, 20% and above growth of revenue, and maintain a relatively high profitability. With that, I think we'll continue to support the Lenovo overall service lab transformation strategy. Thank you.
Thank you, Ken. Kirk, ISG again.
I think from a profitability perspective, as you can see this quarter, the focus on high-margin products, even in a supply-constrained environment, enabled us to significantly improve profitability and retain profit for the full year and the second quarter in a row. This is really driven by our three S strategy around attaching storage in four areas: traditional storage, cloud storage, software-defined storage, and hyper-converged storage. In HPC, we're number one in supercomputing. The second is in services, as Ken talked about, and the third is in attaching more and more software, both developed internally at Lenovo as well as by our core partners, whether that's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, Red Hat, and others. The three S strategy, I think, means that we'll continue year-on-year profit growth and quarter-on-quarter growth for the future.
Relative to revenue, I think we are confident we can have a strong premium to market, with a market that is growing, as I said, close to 10% in the foreseeable future. Lastly, we have the ability to balance revenue growth and profit because, as we've shown for multiple quarters, our business is unique in that it's almost perfectly split between public cloud and enterprise on-prem. In a hybrid multi-cloud world, that means we benefit both on the on-prem side as well as the public cloud grows. I think that's quite unique among our competitors. We don't have an exact percentage of the business. You should expect us to grow revenue quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year, and do the same with profit and at a premium to market. Thank you.
Thank you, Kirk. Thank you, Ken. Now we move to the next question. It's from Jerry Su of Credit Suisse. Could you talk about the impact of the Shenzhen lockdown on the ISG business in fiscal quarter four? Are the orders pushed out to this quarter? How is the current lockdown in the Shanghai area impacting the ISG and SSG businesses respectively?
Yeah. This is Kirk.
Yeah.
Oh, go ahead, Wang.
Yeah. Kirk, go ahead. You continue, please.
I would just say we have a record backlog across almost every part of our business in the Infrastructure Solutions Group. We're not seeing orders canceled, but certainly the lockdown in the last couple of weeks of the quarter did affect our revenue, as you could see in the fourth quarter. That backlog pushed into Q1, our fiscal Q1. Again, we're seeing a record backlog, and we think the scale of Lenovo's growth now, with, you know, another $10 billion year-on-year kind of growth, that kind of one Lenovo approach to the market, taking advantage of our scale in phone, PC, and tablet, is helping the data center business, and we think we'll recover faster than the industry on the supply constraints.
It did affect us, but we now have a record backlog of firm orders, and we believe we'll recover faster than the markets on the scale of Lenovo and our industry-leading supply chain.
Speaking, the Shanghai lockdown impacted our PC business more on the supply chain, and less on our smartphone and ISG businesses. Our smartphone and ISG business demands are still very strong. They are definitely still constrained by the supply of component ICs. We are confident we will grow in these two businesses, SSG, actually. As I said, now only half of its business is related to hardware. The other half is managed service and project and solution service.
I think it's less impacted by this lockdown.
Thank you, Yuanqing. Due to limited time, we are now ready to take the last question. Our last question is from Albert Hung of JP Morgan. How do you keep the ISG profit-making in the fiscal quarter when the revenue declined by $500 million sequentially, but GTI only declined by $10 million? How do you explain the substantial difference? Then, going forward into the second half, should we expect a huge rebound in terms of profits on revenue rebound? That's our last question from JP Morgan.
Kirk, you wanna answer first?
Sure. I think if you look at some of the constraints in the industry, whether, for example, power supplies or things like this, we definitely were able to prioritize our highest-margin products and solutions. I think that's the main reason. We were very careful in prioritizing higher-margin solutions in the market. I think that's the core element, in addition to adding and attaching more things around the actual hardware. Every quarter now, we're getting, as you saw, records in software and services. We still have an opportunity to increase our attach rate of this type of thing even further. Lastly, we did pass through costs to the end-user, as many companies have, around some of the premiums that we've seen.
Those changes in our cost structure sometimes take 1-2 quarters to flow through the system because we have deals that may last multiple quarters on a contract. As those contracts renew, we're passing through some of those costs and improving our profit. That should continue as we look forward in the market. As I said earlier, in terms of rebounds in profits on revenue rebound, I think we expect our expense-to-revenue ratio to continue to improve as revenue increases. Again, we'll see better profits quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year in addition to premium-to-market revenue growth. We have high confidence in that based on the backlog we're seeing out several quarters. Thank you.
Adding a point to what Kirk just said: You may be surprised by this achievement, but I'm not. You should remember when we bought the IBM PC from IBM, that business lost $200 million-$300 million a year. Now ThinkPads make more than $1 billion profit for us a year. When we bought Motorola in 2014, it had lost $1 billion at Google in one year, in 2013. Last year we made $360 million. We keep replicating this kind of successful turnaround story.
That's Lenovo's strength. We know how to be more efficient, how to make money from this kind of hardware business. We have this kind of culture and methodology. I'm pretty sure for our ISG business it will quickly become not just our growth engine but also our cash cow. Thank you.
Thank you, Yuanqing, and thank you, Kirk, and thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me directly. The replay of this webcast will be available in the next couple of hours on our investor relations website. Thank you again for joining us, and this is the end of the call. Thank you very much. Bye-bye now.