Waiting for Godin: Lenovo's UK, Irish ops finally get a boss

High-flying PC firm Lenovo has made company veteran Marc Godin the head of its UK and Irish operations, a role that has been vacant for nearly three years.

This is the first appointment made by EMEA supremo Gianfranco Lanci – Godin's immediate superior – since he pitched up at the vendor, initially as a consultant before landing a permanent role.

"Our ambition is to become the number three PC company in EMEA - our business in UK and Ireland is fundamental to achieving our growth targets," said former Acer CEO Lanci.

Godin became an IBM sales rep in 1989 and moved between various European roles before the PC division was consumed by Lenovo.

Subsequently he held a number of veep positions, most recently running the enterprise and public sector unit across Western Europe.

Godin said in a prepared statement that Lenovo was one of the "top three" PC firms in the enterprise market in the UK.

"My goal is to ensure we can translate that success into even higher market share, but also attack the opportunities that the consumer market presents," he said.

The previous UK and Ireland boss at Lenovo was Alan Munro, who held the position for 21 months before heading off to run the vendor's operations in Australia and New Zealand in September 2009.

In the past few years Lenovo has rejigged its supply chain to cut lead times and price its kit more aggressively, and moved to minimise conflict with its direct sales folk by merging the corporate and SME teams.

Perhaps most importantly, Lenovo won strong backing from dealers by dishing out bigger rebates. All of these accumulative efforts have started to translate into market share gains.

So much so that the Chinese firm told The Reg last October it is aiming to seize the global PC crown from HP within three years, having knocked Dell out of second spot, and continued to record double-digit shipments rises in Q4 and Q1.

Lenovo tells us that Godin's role was created following an internal reshuffle made at the time of Lanci's appointment when UK and Ireland operations became one of five regions comprising EMEA.

Previously the UK was part of the Mature Markets Group under the guidance of Milko van Duijl, now president of Asia Pacific and Latin America. ®