Lenovo Vows To Rely On Partners More In PC Race

The new Lenovo last week provided a sneak peek of new ThinkPads. At the same time, the company’s top executives pledged to rely more heavily on business partners as Lenovo moves to overtake rivals in the PC market.

The new ThinkPad Z-Series Widescreen notebooks will have a crash-resistant inner frame and include a model with an optional titanium cover, a move beyond the legacy black ThinkPad. The ThinkPad Z60T and Z60M, which will begin shipping later this month, will come in 14-inch and 15.4-inch widescreen form factors, respectively, and be the first broadline notebooks to have integrated EVDO broadband wireless connectivity. Pricing and other details were not immediately available but will be made public when the systems are officially announced.

Regarding Lenovo’s marketing plans, Deepak Advani, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, said that while the legacy IBM business included some large customers that prefer a direct relationship with the vendor, it’s a small and shrinking part of Lenovo’s strategy.

“Given the fact that we are putting a lot of emphasis on transaction business, given there is a very high growth [in that space], our dependence on the business partner channel will increase over time,” Advani said.

Yuanqing Yang, Lenovo’s chairman, said the former Beijing-based, now New York-based, PC maker, is shooting to grow at twice the industry growth rate.

“I just expect we will focus on growth first. That will give us more advantage competitively,” Yang said. “We also have to reduce our expense to revenue. But certainly we will be able to leverage Lenovo China’s more efficient operation to lower expense to revenue.”

Yang said Lenovo will strengthen its brand, its revenue and its relationships with business partners to reach its aggressive goals.

“I expect the new Lenovo will become the most competitive PC company and the most famous PC brand in the world,” Yang said during the New York news conference. “This means our market share will be significantly higher than now. We will be very healthy [and] profitable.”

Lenovo, which crashed the world stage last year when it announced it would buy the former IBM PC Co., including its ThinkPad brand and desktops, has maintained a low-key status since that deal closed in April.

Lenovo business partners have, so far, indicated few if any significant repercussions from the acquisition of the IBM PC business.

Ronald Coleman, CEO of MarCole Interactive Systems, a Walnut Creek, Calif.-based Lenovo partner that previously had been a partner of the IBM PC group, said some minor issues came up during the transition. “They had a few hiccups in the transition,” he said. “A few [minor] things fell through the cracks as people moved from one company to another.”

But he said the brand strength of the ThinkPad continues to impress, and enhancements to the line would be a plus. “I think the ThinkPad is probably the best device on the market, overall,” Coleman said. “It’s always been a fairly high-performance device with good, quality options.”

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