Lenovo: Where to now?
Published: 04 Mar 2005 14:30 GMT
Having settled its executive ranks, Lenovo's main initiatives now involve taking advantage of its larger scale -- something that can bring better prices on the parts it needs to build its PCs -- and establishing the Lenovo brand name. It has begun working on ways to sell Lenovo-designed products to the rest of the world, O'Sullivan said. Those efforts could yield the delivery of Lenovo-brand desktops and notebooks to customers in the United States, for example.
The new Lenovo is also likely to move more quickly and target different types of customers than IBM's PC group has in the recent past, including consumers and very small businesses.
O'Sullivan, along with two other executives, will oversee the integration process, she said. In all, there are 17 functions, ranging from parts procurement to accounting, that must be integrated. Each has its own integration leader.
"Every single function that touches how you take an order, build a product and ship a product has a team assigned to the transition," O'Sullivan said. "Every single country has a transition team so that they can look at, 'How can I, on day one in my country, be ready to operate... as the new Lenovo."
As previously reported, the new Lenovo's headquarters will be in New York, but it will maintain operations in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in Beijing. Yang Yuanqing, who is now president and CEO of Lenovo, will become Lenovo's chairman, while Stephen Ward, currently general manager of IBM Personal Systems Group, will serve as its CEO. Mary Ma, Lenovo's CFO, will remain at her post.
O'Sullivan, in her role as COO of Lenovo International, will focus on selling products outside of China. Liu Jun, currently a senior vice-president with Lenovo, will become the COO of Lenovo China, focusing on efforts in the country.
The new Lenovo will have a wide range of markets to set its sights on. While IBM PCs, such as the ThinkPad notebook line, are distributed widely around the world, Lenovo PCs are not. Lenovo products can thus be introduced in the United States, Europe and other markets, O'Sullivan said.
This week, IBM showed the Tian Jino A desktop along with another, low-cost desktop PC to distributors at its PartnerWorld conference in Las Vegas in an effort to give them an idea of what to expect.
The new Lenovo will continue with IBM's hybrid sales channel, offering its PCs both through distributors and direct to customers, via the Web and telephone sales.
But it won't just stick to the business markets it will inherit from IBM.
"Frankly, we were on a strategy to being extremely focused on corporate accounts" before IBM's announced partnership with Lenovo, Ward told attendees at PartnerWorld, adding that businesses buy only about half of all PCs. "There's a big opportunity for us as the technologies become deepened and more and more available to get out into that [consumer] market."
CNET News.com's Martin LaMonica contributed to this report
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