From its humble beginnings in a guard house in Beijing, the company that later came to be known as Lenovo grew to a Fortune 500 company, known all over the world as one of the leading technology firms in the market.
Known initially as Legend Holdings, the company was founded in 1984 by Liu Chuanzhi and a group of ten engineers in Beijing, with a capital investment of only 200,000 yuan or $25,000 to begin their operations. The visionary team’s innovative efforts led to the development of an IBM-compatible circuit board that was capable of reading Chinese characters. Such an innovation received the highest National Science Technology Progress Award in China and was Legend’s first major breakthrough, a taste of things to come.
In 1988, the company opened for business in Hong Kong and, within eight years, became China’s largest PC company.
Legend continued the development of game-changing technologies, like the DeepComp 1800 supercomputer, China’s first computer with 1,000 GFLOP (floating point operations per second). It was the country’s fastest computer for civilian use, ranking among the world’s fastest computers.
In 2004, Legend undertook a massive rebranding ahead of its acquisition of IBM’s Personal Computing Division. The rest, as they say, is history.
From a small team of engineers, Lenovo is now a company of 55,000 employees serving customers in over 160 countries, including the Philippines. The company offers a portfolio of products and services including workstations, servers, storage solutions, IT management software, tablets, and smartphones.
“As the world becomes faster, more demanding, and more competitive, so has our business. By continually innovating, we enable our customers to challenge and inspire everyone around them. And help keep things moving forward in a more interesting way,” Lenovo writes on its website.
As a multinational company that is incorporated and headquartered in Hong Kong, Lenovo strategically holds operational centers around the world to drive its global and local business approach.
“Lenovo organizes its worldwide operations with the view that a truly global company must be able to quickly capitalize on new ideas and opportunities from anywhere. By foregoing a traditional headquarters model and focusing on centers of excellence around the world, Lenovo makes maximum use of its resources to create the best products in the most efficient and effective way possible. In addition, our dispersed structure keeps us closer to customers, enabling Lenovo to react quickly to local market requirements,” Lenovo writes.
In the Philippines, Lenovo offers a portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services that cover PCs (including the legendary Think and multimode YOGA brands), workstations, servers, storage, a family of mobile products like smartphones (including the Moto brand), and tablets through its partnership with Integrated Computer Systems, Inc. (ICS).
“ICS is one of the very first channel partners of Lenovo. Our partnership started way back in the 80’s in the commercial PC business. Recently, ICS was named a Lenovo Platinum Partner, the highest partnership level for Lenovo PC business in the Philippines,” the company says.
“Through the years, ICS has built a strong and resilient relationship with Lenovo. ICS has been a crucial factor in growing global, key, and small to medium-sized business accounts’ revenue and customer base.”
Through its three-decade-long partnership with ICS, Lenovo has become one of the top PC brands in the country. And it aims to continue its history of excellence.
As the world moves forward with technologies like augmented and virtual reality, smart offices that serve to enhance employee productivity no matter where they may be, or even technologies like the Internet of Things and cloud computing, Lenovo plans to be there each step of the way.
“At Lenovo, our vision [is to be able] to create personal devices more people are inspired to own, a culture more people aspire to join, and an enduring, trusted business that is well respected around the world. This vision guides us in pursuit of our mission to become one of the world’s great personal technology companies,” Lenovo writes.
