Excuses, excuses
cars are consuming more batteries and making them hard to come by
I can see that it would make lithium costs go up, but there's no real shortage. A tight market, yes, but nobody else is crying into their beer, and Platts even expect demand to exceed supply by next year. Whether they're right or not is not important, the point is that supply and demand are fairly well balanced.
Even if Lenovo had to absorb a lithium price rise, so does every competitor. Even then, the battery is a tiny part of the BoM for any halfway decent phone, and a small part for a computer, and of that battery cost half is the production, packaging and connectors of the cells, not the commodity lithium.
Can we have a better quality excuse next quarter?