Hit by a sharp decline in sales and heavy financial losses, Lenovo Group’s new management team is turning the company’s focus back to China.
“With the changes in the macroeconomic environment, our business in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and the Americas has been impacted greatly, so our company is increasing its focus on China, as well as emerging markets,” Liu Chuanzhi, the company’s newly reinstated chairman, told reporters during a conference call.
China is Lenovo’s most important market, accounting for 45 percent of the company’s sales during the most recent quarter.
Lenovo took observers by surprise on Thursday with the announcement that President and CEO William Amelio had resigned at the end of his three-year contract, which ended in December. Amelio, formerly the president of Dell’s Asian operations, led Lenovo through an ongoing restructuring program designed to improve the company’s competitiveness.
Amelio was replaced by Yang Yuanqing, who will step down from his current position as chairman of Lenovo to take on the CEO role. Liu, the company’s founder and former chairman, returned to his former position and Rory Read, Lenovo’s senior vice president of global operations, will take on the role of president and chief operating officer.
At the same time that Lenovo announced Amelio’s departure, the company reported a quarterly loss of $97 million on sales of $3.6 billion, which represented a decline of 20 percent compared to the same period during the previous year. Whether a renewed focus on China will help Lenovo reverse its fortunes in the short term remains to be seen: the company singled out a drop in Chinese demand for PCs as a primary reason for the lower sales and financial losses.
Bringing back Yang and Liu to their previous positions echoes the earlier returns of Michael Dell to Dell and Steve Jobs to Apple during periods when these companies struggled to compete. But Yang and Liu, who ran the company at a time when its sales were largely confined to China, return to a dramatically different company, thanks to the 2004 acquisition of IBM’s former PC division.
For the past four years, two Americans have held the CEO position at Lenovo, Amelio and predecessor, Stephen Ward, who became CEO immediately following the acquisition. Ward resigned in late 2005.
To be successful in their bid to revive Lenovo’s fortunes, Yang and Liu will still have to improve the company’s position in the worldwide PC market, not just in China. When Yang and Liu announced plans to acquire IBM’s PC division, they said the deal would turn Lenovo into an international company and allow it to better compete against multinational vendors Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
That is still the company’s goal, Liu said.
“We are enhancing our foundation in China so that we can have further development in the future in those mature markets. We will try our best to protect our market position either in the U.S. or Europe,” he said.
Yang echoed that sentiment. “I’m the CEO of this company. I still want this company to be a global company,” he said.