Lenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo (/ləˈnoʊvoʊ/ lə-NOH-voh, Chinese: 联想; pinyin: Liánxiǎng), is a Chinese[8] multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions, and related services. Products manufactured by the company include desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers, smartphones, workstations, servers, supercomputers, electronic storage devices, IT management software, and smart televisions. Its best-known brands include its ThinkPad business line of laptop computers (acquired from IBM), the IdeaPad, Yoga, and Legion consumer lines of laptop computers, and the IdeaCentre and ThinkCentre lines of desktop computers. As of 2021, Lenovo is the world’s largest personal computer vendor by unit sales.[9][10]

Lenovo was founded in Beijing on 1 November 1984 as Legend by a team of engineers led by Liu Chuanzhi and Danny Lui.[11] Initially specializing in televisions, the company migrated towards manufacturing and marketing computers. Lenovo grew to become the market leader in China and raised nearly US$30 million in an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Since the 1990s, Lenovo has increasingly diversified from the personal computer market and made a number of corporate acquisitions, with the most notable being acquiring and integrating most of IBM’s personal computer business and its x86-based server business as well as creating its own smartphone.[12]

Lenovo has operations in over 60 countries and sells its products in around 180 countries.[citation needed] It was incorporated in Hong Kong,[1] with global headquarters in Beijing,[2][3] and operational centres in Singapore and Morrisville, North Carolina, US. It has research centres in Beijing, Chengdu, Yamato (Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan), Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Morrisville,[5] and also has Lenovo NEC Holdings, a joint venture with NEC that produces personal computers for the Japanese market.

“Lenovo” is a portmanteau of “Le-” (from Legend) and “novo”, Latin ablative for “new”. The Chinese name (simplified Chinese: 联想; traditional Chinese: 聯想; pinyin: Liánxiǎng) means “association” (as in “association of ideas”), “associative thinking”, or “connected thinking”. It also implies creativity.[76] “Lianxiang” was first used to refer to a layout of Chinese typewriters in the 1950s organized into groups of common words and phrases rather than the standard dictionary layout.[77]

For the first 20 years of its existence, the company’s English name was “Legend”. In 2002, Yang Yuanqing decided to abandon the Legend English name to expand beyond the Chinese home market. “Legend” was already in use worldwide by many businesses whose products and services may or may not have to do with technology,[78] making it impossible to register in many jurisdictions outside China. In April 2003, the company publicly announced its new English name, “Lenovo”, with an advertising campaign including huge billboards and primetime television ads. Lenovo spent 18 million RMB on an eight-week television advertising campaign. The billboards showed the Lenovo logo against blue sky with a slogan that read, “Transcendence depends on how you think.” By the end of 2003, Lenovo had spent a total of 200 million RMB on rebranding.[13]

Products and services

Lenovo is a manufacturer of personal computers, smartphones, televisions, and wearable devices. Some of the company’s earliest products included the KT8920 mainframe computer[13] and a circuit board that allowed IBM-compatible personal computers to process Chinese characters.[15] One of its first computers was the Tianxi (天禧), released in 1998 in the Chinese market. It became the best selling computer in Chinese history in 2000.[18]