Lenovo Takes On Dell
Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing, who will be chairman of the combined IBM-Lenovo venture, and IBM veteran Stephen Ward, who will become CEO, outlined plans for the value-priced PC line in an interview with CRN last week.
Lenovo plans to spend $200 million in marketing funds to help drive sales through the channel, Ward said. The company rounded out its executive team by naming longtime IBM executive Mark Enzweiler vice president of worldwide business partner sales, and Stephen Mungall vice president of U.S. distribution and reseller sales.
Ward said that upon the close of Lenovo's acquisition of the $12.5 billion IBM PC business, expected next quarter, Lenovo will bring to the United States a line of aggressively priced PCs that complement IBM's existing ThinkPad and ThinkCentre PCs.
The Lenovo systems will be sold through the channel and positioned as products aimed at the SOHO and SMB markets while IBM's existing line of PCs will be marketed at customers seeking more feature-rich systems, Ward said. "We're still working on exactly where the line between these systems and our existing systems is going to be," he said. "But we will have a full range of systems available across all market segments."
The new line of Lenovo PCs will be priced aggressively against competitors such as Dell, while existing IBM systems will be positioned as offerings that sport additional features at prices that slightly undercut rival offerings, Ward said. "It's a misnomer that Dell is the low price leader. But this will make us a lot more competitive to Dell."
Bob Venero, president and CEO of Future Tech, an IBM solution provider in Holbrook, N.Y., said he is excited by the prospect that a new more aggressive Lenovo will help him take share from Dell. "You have created a more streamlined, faster, smaller organization that can react to industry turns better than IBM can itself," he said. Venero said he recently displaced 3,000 Dell Latitude notebooks with IBM ThinkPads because of the high rate of failures on the Dell products.
STEVEN BURKE contributed to this story.