Lenovo: A good two years

Two weeks shy from celebrating its second anniversary since it acquired IBM Corp.’s PC business, Lenovo is showing increased aggressiveness in all fronts, from technology and research innovations to sales and marketing.

In the Philippines, the event might even coincide with the opening of Lenovo’s first retail store at the Mall of Asia in Pasay City. Vicky Agorilla, country general manager of Lenovo Philippines, said their plan is to put up several Lenovo stores in strategic malls around the country, a move that sits well with the company’s other objective of improving brand recognition.

During the last two years, Lenovo has busily rolled out major product sets that not only helped it establish a stronger brand away from IBM’s shadows, it has also progressively found its way to becoming the No. 1 PC vendor in the Asia-Pacific region based on unit shipments, according to the IDC Asia-Pacific Quarterly PC Tracker report in 2006.

Today, the government and the banking industry give Lenovo Philippines bulk of its business, said Agorilla. Lenovo is the supplier of Linux-based machines for the government’s long-running PCs for public high schools project. Now on its second phase, the project requires Lenovo to deliver a total of 15,000 Lenovo desktop units running on open source software.

However, there is no sign that Lenovo will follow Dell Computer’s recent move to commercially bundle its select PCs and laptops with Linux and OpenOffice.org as an alternative to the new Windows Vista.

Agorilla said she has not heard of any similar plans from the corporate office. But customers who insist on using open source solutions may opt "to buy DOS-based machines and install whatever operating system they choose," she added. Taiwan PC maker Acer Computer also reportedly has plans to make available computers bundled with Linux. 

The company’s heightened marketing efforts, meanwhile, brought in last week a distinguished engineer and executive director for research and technology from Lenovo’s laboratories in Yamato, Japan. Masaki Kobayashi, one of the company’s most senior executives in charge of the development of the ThinkPad line of notebook computers, was in the country to meet with local Lenovo customers to show them key R&D activities in the Japan development and testing facility to, hopefully, make them appreciate the product and the brand even more. 

"ThinkPad’s DNA is innovation," said Kobayashi as he began discussing every salient aspect that makes up a ThinkPad notebook.

From LCD screens and keyboard design to the use of special materials and chemical coating to prevent fingerprints and scratches, down to technology roadmaps and which standards they support as in the case of Blu-ray disc versus HD-DVD, Kobayashi left nothing out. His talk also ranged from technology breakthroughs to what is practical, examples of which have found their way in some of the latest ThinkPad and Lenovo products.

But there’s at least one thing that will remain constant. The ThinkPad is not going to shed its black color despite the proliferation of laptops that come in white and other vivid colors. Agorilla explained that the ThinkPad has made inroads in different market segments, but it would remain primarily a business machine presented appropriately in "formal black."