3 Things You Didn’t Know About Lenovo

Lenovo is the largest PC vendor in the world.

The company is officially known as “Lenovo Group Ltd. (Limited)” and is a multinational Chinese technology company that has been in the manufacturing game for decades, creating desktop computers, tablet computers, laptop computers, smartphones, dumb-phones, workstations, servers, digital storage devices, servers, and more. Lenovo also dabbled in the IT management software world as well as the newest frontier of smart televisions.

While the brand is well known the world over, here in America it’s best-known as IBM’s ThinkPad business line of affordable and reliable laptop computers, there’s a host of other fun laptop names like IdeaPad, Yoga, and the eerily named Legion consumer line of laptops.

Idea Centre and ThinkCentre are two lines that had incomes over $3.1 billion dollars last year when they only had 75,000 employees! That’s an insane income for all of those employees if the CEOs are doing the right thing and paying their underlings what they’re worth versus what the upper class thinks they deserve.

If you’re still looking for more information on the beginning and formation of the company, click here for the Wikipedia article.

Lenovo has two headquarters: Hong Kong, Beijing & Morrisville, NC.

All of the headquarters that Lenovo has run under the same umbrella, centrally headquartered in their Chinese headquarters of Hong Kong, where the company is commonly referred to as “Legend” which some view as pretty arrogant. The current chairman and CEO is named Yang Yuanqing whereas the former’s name is Liu Chuanzh, who also has the honor and distinction of being the founder.

Liu Chuanzh is a former government scientist who spent years and years at a forced labor camp during what was known as “The Cultural Revolution”. He founded Lenovo with a small loan of under $25,000 from the government while he was working as a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Science.

Lenovo is well-entrenched in the culture of Hong Kong and Beijing as opposed to the rest of the mainland of the country and is regarded as one of the most trusted brands in the whole entire world. As of around 2006, the company held almost half the market share of all of the Chinese personal computers and sold most of its products at more than 10,000 retail establishment chains all over the globe.

The company and its subsidiaries frequently outperform competitors in the foreign rival market because it doesn’t pay any sort of tariffs that foreign companies must pay when importing their goods or services into the country.

Fun fact: It was the very first company to sign up to be a sponsor for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Some people say the company paid like $70 million for the sponsorship and branding rights involving both the 2006 Olympics in Turin and 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Outside of that, all servers and computer equipment were all sponsored by IBM.

The name “Lenovo” has an interesting yet underwhelming history.

The word Lenovo is actually a portmanteau which means that it is actually a combination of two words: “legend” and “novo”. “Legend” was chosen for the strength and meaning of the word, which is defined as an extremely famous or notorious person or thing while “novo” means “new” in Latin. So, in essence, the company’s name means “a very new and famous thing”. Source: https://kids.kiddle.co/Lenovo

That is the case in America, at least. In China where the company was founded, as previously stated, instead of Lenovo the corporation is known as Lianxiang, which means “thinking in a connected sort of way”. This is arguably the better name as the American one doesn’t really make any sense.

There are a few other names either officially or unofficially associated with Lenovo or have been over the years. “Legend”, “IBM”, and “ThinkPad” are probably the most common. However, the umbrella carries dozens of brand names beneath it that number in the hundreds of thousands when counted correctly and in a line.

There are a lot of new and innovative tech companies out there competing for your business as a small-business owner or personal computer owner. However, that shouldn’t speak for quality, as in general large retailers have seen a decline in their electronics departments’ quality.

And prices are only going up. Especially considering how much servers cost these days, you want to make sure that you are purchasing something that you can put some miles into as opposed to something that will need to be replaced every few years.

Hopefully you learned a thing or two about one of the world’s largest and well-known computer companies. They’ve been pioneers for so long their name is synonymous with success and longevity and will be for years to come in such a volatile market.