Lenovo

Lenovo Group Limited, trading as Lenovo (联想, Liánxiǎng), is a Chinese multinational technology company headquartered in Beijing, China, and Morrisville, North Carolina, USA, with its registered office in Hong Kong. Founded on 1 November 1984 in Beijing as Legend (联想) by a team of eleven engineers from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Liu Chuanzhi and Danny Lui, the company started with 200,000 yuan in seed capital. After early forays into TV imports and computer quality-checking, Legend began manufacturing and selling its own computers in 1990, and its circuit board that let IBM-compatible PCs process Chinese characters became an early success. Legend listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1994 (ticker 992) and grew into China's largest PC maker, holding roughly 43% of the domestic computer market by 1998. Its Tianxi (天禧) desktop, launched in 1998 with a one-touch internet button, sold over a million units and became the best-selling computer in Chinese history. In April 2003 the company rebranded from "Legend" to "Lenovo" — a portmanteau of "Le-" (from Legend) and Latin "novo" (new) — as it pushed beyond the Chinese home market. In 2005 Lenovo made its landmark move onto the world stage, acquiring IBM's personal computer business for US$1.25 billion plus $500 million of debt. The deal brought the iconic ThinkPad laptop and ThinkCentre desktop lines, IBM's manufacturing technology and global sales channels, and made Lenovo the third-largest PC maker worldwide. IBM held an 18.9% stake in Lenovo at closing and fully divested by 2011. Following further acquisitions — including Germany's Medion (2011), Brazil's CCE (2012), IBM's x86 server business System x and BladeCenter for $2.1 billion (2014), and a 51% joint venture with NEC for the Japanese PC market — Lenovo became the world's largest personal computer vendor by unit sales in 2013, a position it has held ever since. It also re-entered the smartphone market in 2012 with the K series and Vibe line, quickly becoming the largest smartphone vendor in mainland China. In January 2014 Lenovo announced it would buy Motorola Mobility from Google for US$2.91 billion, a deal that closed on 30 October 2014 and gave Lenovo the Moto X, Moto G and Droid lines plus royalty-free licenses to Google's retained patents. Today Motorola is Lenovo's smartphone brand, with Lenovo's consumer PC lines (IdeaPad, Yoga, Legion, LOQ, ThinkPad, ThinkCentre) and its servers, workstations, storage and smart TV products sold worldwide. The company reported revenue of US$69.1 billion in fiscal 2024/25, employs about 72,000 people, and is led by chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing.