The Hindu Business Line : Lenovo showcases 22 new products at Las Vegas show

Lenovo announced 22 new products across its series of computers – desktops, notebooks and netbooks – for its world markets as well as two mobile devices for China at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

All of Lenovo's new products go towards supporting its “protect-and-attack” strategy, said Mr Rory Read, Chief Operating Officer, Lenovo. The enterprise market worldwide and the China market are its strengths and the emerging markets are the volumes driver in the next 5-10 years, he added.

The “protect” part has worked well: Lenovo has a 30 per cent share of the Chinese market; and, its ThinkPad business has grown 30 per cent, three times the growth of the worldwide enterprise PC business. And Lenovo has done well with the “attack” part of the strategy, too: it has grown 65 per cent in emerging markets, four times the growth of the total PC business in emerging markets.

Mr Nick Reynolds, Global Marketing Director, Worldwide Product Group – Marketing and Communications, spoke about the headline products on the “attack” front – the IdeaPad U1 hybrid with the LePad slate, a two-in-one device in which the device looks like a small laptop, but the screen can be slipped off the case to operate as a slate or tablet device. The “laptop” runs Windows 7 while the “slate” runs Android 2.2. Reynolds said that the main idea behind it was to enable content production as well as content consumption on the hybrid form-factor. He added that the product will be available in China in March 2011 and a version of the product will be available in other markets by the end of the year.

All-in-one PC

Lenovo also announced four new all-in-one (AIO) PCs at CES this year, at various price points, with one AIO also including a hardware TV, that is, a television-cum-PC, in which the consumer need not power up the PC to watch TV. AIOs have been a surprise growth segment, with growth in three digits (165 per cent), and Mr Rory Read expects AIO growth to outpace traditional notebook PC growth, with slates/tablets pushing netbooks back into the notebooks fold. And in line with that expectation, Lenovo has announced the ThinkPad X120e, an entry-level ultraportable notebook which offers notebook-level performance at a high-end netbook price point.

Mr David A. Roman, Chief Marketing Officer and SVP, said the youth market was a global audience and because of the Internet, youth around the world had the same perception of technology, music, movies, and brands, and being “cool” was very important to them, speaking about the six new series of IdeaPad notebooks announced.

He also spoke about the SMB need for contemporary design and the fact that the notebook should look good was important to them. To that end, the new e220s and e420s notebooks sport contemporary industrial design, better processors and slim profiles for a new form factor. He was bullish on the Indian market and said that while Lenovo was traditionally strong in the enterprise market, it also had a surprisingly strong presence in the consumer in the Indian consumer market as well.

Mr Chen Shaopeng, Senior Vice-President – Lenovo and President – emerging market group, speaking on priorities for mobility devices, said that Lenovo sees the mobile Internet as a big opportunity for both revenues and profits. On the rest of the world having to wait for the devices till later in the year, he said that Lenovo wants to get three things right: full coverage of a user's needs, that is, strong social offering for consumers and strong productivity offering for enterprise; customised solutions for specific regional markets, which need a specific app ecosystem for different markets; and, to partner with top tier telcos and ISPs to provide maximum coverage to leverage the mobility devices.

Mr Shaopeng added that China is a great incubator because Lenovo is strong in China in the mobile space, and it is easy for it to test global plays. He said the U1 LePad hybrid will be a global play and Lenovo would take a phased approach with LePhone, Lenovo's Android-based smartphone launched in China last March, but that emerging markets were a priority for this product.

It was not all products and devices at the Lenovo showcase at CES 2011; it also showed off a concept Smart TV, and also announced its Enhanced Experience 2.0 (EE2), an exclusive certification available only in Lenovo products preloaded with Windows 7. The main benefit of EE2 is faster boot-up times. EE2 can lead to a boot-up an average of 20 seconds faster than a typical Windows PC, and in case of some products with SSD, the boot-up will take less than ten seconds.

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