Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo Group Ltd. is a Chinese multinational computer technology company with headquarters in Beijing, China, and Morrisville, North Carolina, United States. It designs, develops, manufactures and sells personal computers, tablet computers, smartphones, workstations, servers, electronic storage devices, IT management software and smart televisions. In 2013 Lenovo was the world's largest personal computer vendor by unit sales.

It markets the ThinkPad line of notebook computers and the ThinkCentre line of desktops. Lenovo entered the smartphone market in 2012 and as of 2014 is the largest vendor of smartphones in Mainland China. In January 2014, Lenovo agreed to acquire the mobile phone handset maker Motorola Mobility from Google.

The company was praised for its good management, strong brand recognition, and growth potential. Lenovo has dedicated mergers and acquisitions team that tracks the progress of these integrations. Lenovo acquired IBM's personal computer business in 2005, including the ThinkPad laptop and tablet lines. This acquisition made Lenovo the third-largest computer maker worldwide by volume. Lenovo sold its smartphone and tablet division in 2008 for US$100 million in order to focus on personal computers and then paid US$200 million to buy it back in November 2009. Lenovo entered the smartphone market in 2012 and quickly became the largest vendor of smartphones in Mainland China. In May 2012, Lenovo announced an investment of US$793 million in the construction of a mobile phone manufacturing and R&D facility in Wuhan, China. On 29 January 2014, Google announced it would sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for US$2.91 billion in a cash-and-stock deal.

Lenovo has aggressively expanded the ThinkPad brand away from traditional laptop computers in favor of tablets and hybrid devices such as the ThinkPad Tablet 2, ThinkPad Yoga, ThinkPad 8, ThinkPad Helix, and ThinkPad Twist; the shift came as a response to the growing popularity of mobile devices, and the release of Windows 8 in October 2012. Lenovo has achieved significant success with this high-value strategy and it now controls more than 40% of the market for Windows computers priced above $900 in the United States. . Lenovo passed Apple to become the No. 2 provider of smartphones to the Chinese market in 2012.