CHINA'S SUPERLATIVE haul of 51 gold medals in the Beijing Olympic Games impressed the world, and signalled China's intention to dominate the sporting world for some time to come, writes Clifford Coonan
Another major source of pride for the Chinese, and an equally potent statement of intent, was the fact the IT services at the games were provided by a Chinese company, Lenovo. This growing domestic player even designed the Olympic torch, which went on a controversial relay around the world before lighting the Olympic flame in the Bird's Nest stadium.
Lenovo is probably China's most important international company as it is one of the few with a broader profile, especially in the Asian Pacific region, but the management is hoping that Lenovo will take a major step into becoming a truly global brand.
Lenovo has proudly trumpeted how it provided a multi-layered computing solution for the world's biggest sporting event, consisting of more than 30,000 pieces of equipment and nearly 600 engineers, and it managed to a Snafu-free service for the duration of the games, something commented on by both the journalists using the computers and printers provided as well as those using the equipment at the sport sites in the field.
"Lenovo is well known in China, and it's starting to get well known in Europe. We've shown that we can support the biggest sporting event in the world with technology and we can get our name out there.
"When you start a new brands, you need to do something stunning, and we've done this with the Turin Winter Olympics and the Beijing Summer Olympics," said Milko van Dujil, president of Lenovo's EMEA unit and senior vice president.
The group's ThinkPad T60 notebooks were used to measure results on the ground, something they did without interruption during heavy rains at the field hockey and the beach volleyball, as well as the cycling and the 20-kilometre race walk.
"For most of the world, the Olympic Games started a few days ago," said Leon Xie, Lenovo's Olympic technology and sponsorship director after the games had started. "For us it began two years ago."
The company did IT solutions for 630 competitive events, 302 medal events, seven different event sites, 39 competition venues and 17 data centres, including laptop and desktop PCs and monitors, touch screens, servers and desktop printers.
Lenovo also operated seven internet lounges, i.lounges, offering 260 PCs with broadband internet access to athletes, coaches and the media.
The i.lounges enjoyed average daily traffic of about 3,000 visitors.
Lenovo tries to avoid having a headquarters as such and instead spreads its activities across research centres in Yamato in Japan; in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen in China; and Raleigh, North Carolina, US.
Van Dujil gave his presentation before a tour of the Innovation Design Centre, a multinational research hub combining design, art and ergonomic research - this is where Lenovo's team of engineers developed the Olympic torch.
The group also has a Brand Experience Centre which teaches visitors about leadership in product innovation.
The HQ for Lenovo's core engineering team was the Technology Operations Center (Toc) inside the massive Digital Building on the Olympic Green.
From within the Toc, Lenovo engineers monitored all venues to make sure equipment was in place and operating correctly. Lenovo also maintained hundreds of servers in the Digital Building responsible for handling hundreds of thousands of requests per second. During the games, servers processed more than 23 million live queries.
This is more than just the usual public relations guff, as this is the first time that a Chinese company has been in this position. Lenovo may be more of a familiar name to international audiences now that the games are over. And this is where the Olympics overlaps with Lenovo's aim of becoming a global brand.
Lenovo's main competitors are HP, Dell and Taiwan's Acer, and the competition is fierce. Acer succeeded in edging out Lenovo as the world number three after it bought market share with the purchase of Gateway, which kind of wrongfooted Lenovo, who had also been in the market.
The Lenovo management still give the impression they are a bit sore about the Gateway purchase.
Lenovo, like HP, Dell and Acer before it, has launched low-cost netbooks, although chief executive William Amelio said the company couldn't forecast at the moment.
"It's not important being three or four. If you want to succeed in the PC business, you have to be number one or two.
"We have made a strategic decision not to remain where we are now and our objective is to become bigger than we are now," said van Dujil.
Lenovo's strengths are in the Asia-Pacific market, excluding Japan, but it is now coming up with an aggressive and innovative new global business model which is aimed at individual consumers and small companies in India and Germany. India was one of its first consumer launches outside China and the company has opened two factories and a hub in Bangalore.
And the group has also sited a manufacturing facility in Poland, not far from the crucial German market.
"We're becoming less dependent on the US because of growth in emerging markets," said van Dujil. In the three months to the end of June, Lenovo's net profit rose 65 per cent as strong growth in China offset weaker demand in the US. Lenovo's history is like a textbook narrative of China in the post-1949 period. It started life during the era of China's great helmsman, chairman Mao Zedong.
The company's driving force is co-founder Liu Chuanzhi, who grew up in coastal Jiangsu province, northwest of Shanghai.
Liu is a hugely popular figure in China, a role model for entrepreneurial Chinese. He graduated with a degree in radar communications from the Xi'an Military Communications Engineering College in 1966, just as China was entering the massive upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. As an intellectual, Liu was dispatched to the southern province of Guangdong where he was forced to work the fields like millions of other educated people.
His re-education complete, he came back to Beijing where he worked at the elite China Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
There he remained until the early 1980s. In 1984, he and 10 other researchers launched the company with $25,000 (€17,000) in capital from the academy.
The company was based in a tiny bungalow on the academy grounds, and distributed computers by IBM and AST as well as Hewlett Packard printers.
In 1990, the company began designing and manufacturing its own computers under the Legend brand.
Four years later, it sold shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange, though the academy maintained majority control.
Lenovo's success, like that of so many other big Chinese firms, is based on the country's vast resources of cheap labour. Low production costs meant cheap PCs for the domestic market.
Liu's links to the military and to the Communist Party have certainly been no hindrance and he holds a seat on the National People's Congress, one of the few private sector figures to make a mark in China's political ascendancy. State-owned companies are still big customers for PCs in China.
The age-old Chinese principle of guanxi, the ability to make good connections, is still a factor in Lenovo's success.
China is crucial to Lenovo, where it has a 27 per cent market share - the next biggest company has 8 per cent, and sales are rising strongly.
But to really compete you need to go global, something the management of Lenovo has been quick to realise and for a Chinese company it has been quick to hire foreign talent to run the show. What catapulted Lenovo into the major leagues was its purchase in late 2004 of IBM's PC business for around €1 billion, even though the IBM unit was four times bigger, a daring move that broke the mould for a Chinese company.
The purchase transformed Legend into Lenovo, and made Lenovo the world's third biggest manufacturer of PCs.
"Integration was over and done a year and a half ago, quicker and better than we expected. We wanted to secure and keep our customers, and we spent a lot of time ensuring our global customers felt comfortable. That went super-well, in fact we acquired more customers," said van Dujil.
The global focus does not include becoming one of the top sponsors of the London Games in 2012.
Alongside Kodak and Canada's Manulife, Lenovo said it would not be stumping up the €50 million to retain its status as a leading sponsorship partner in London.
For Lenovo, the Beijing Games was all about establishing its brand.
"Now we need to localise after doing the global. For example, we are going local in France. We're looking at ways of leveraging, as we can leverage in different ways," said van Dujil.
