Showbiz glamour
When we met Lenovo senior VP Fran O'Sullivan recently, we had to confess that our perception of Lenovo was of a steady, reliable, quality PC maker, but not an especially exciting one. O' Sullivan assured us that we would need to revise that perception before long and earlier this week we witnessed the next phase in Lenovo's reinvention of itself.
Don't get us wrong, Lenovo still wants to be viewed as steady, reliable, etc in the enterprise sector - which is where it has historically done most of its business - but it also realises that it needs a bit more pizzazz if it's to broaden its appeal to consumers and SMBs.
So it hosted an extended presentation in the penthouse suite of London's Sanderson hotel, with its showbiz lobby and astronomical lifts (and, we presume, prices). The star of the show was Arimasa Naitoh (pictured), VP of development at the Lenovo notebook business unit, flown over from Japan especially to give us the low-down on Lenovo's notebook plans.
He was introduced by Ken Batty, HR Veep and current UK boss, who gave us a brief bit of context. After all the adjustments needed when Lenovo bought IBM's PC unit in 2005, Lenovo experienced pretty decent growth. This dropped-off dramatically when the recession hit, however, due to a combination of over-reliance on the Chinese market and on enterprise customers.
But things have already turned around this year for Lenovo, with both China and enterprises starting to cheer-up a bit, and he expects Q3 to be a good one.
