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Lenovo chops up biz groups after gobbling IBM x86 servers

PC, mobility, enterprise and er... ecosystem and cloud

Enterprise tech wannabe Lenovo has carved its business into four divisions just a week after it coughed $2.3bn for IBM's x86 server biz, a deal which is awaiting approval from regulators.

The Chinese firm created PC, Mobile, and Enterprise Groups as well as the slightly bizarrely named Ecosystem and Cloud Services unit, it confirmed in a statement.

The Think and own-branded desktop and notebook kit will fall under the guidance of Gianfranco Lanci, who doubles up as EMEA top dog.

In an exercise of stating the bleeding obvious, Lenovo said the group plans to continue to… er, "innovate", "drive profits" and put some clear water between itself and HP, the PC vendor it knocked off the market summit in 2013.

Smartphones, slabs and smart TVs will sit in the Mobile Group, led by Liu Jun, who headed the Lenovo Business Group under the previous structure. This was one of two units that also included the Think Business Group.

Big Blue's struggling x86 biz will form the backbone of the Enterprise unit (server and storage) that will count Gerry Smith, the man who will also continue to run Lenovo Americas group, as its big boss.

"The goal of this group is to aggressively build a new, fast-growing profit engine," the firm said.

This finally happened years after Lenovo bought IBM's PC division but not before changes in leadership, multiple restructures to make itself easier for patners to work with, and a mini meltdown from HP that it has yet to fully recover from.

Former CTO George He will act as senior veep for the Ecosystem and Cloud group, which has a goal to "continue building our China ecosystem and drive a strategy for magnetisation and eco system expansion".

We have asked Lenovo for a clearer explanation of this and were told:

"The goal of this group is to strengthen our valuable China ecosystem (where today we already have 70 million users, nearly 500,000 applications, and over five billion total downloads) and drive a strategy for monetization and ecosystem expansion".

So basically Lenovo are trying to win over more customers in its homeland and squeeze more cash out of them.

In addition to EMEA, Lanci's remit will also include Japan, Australia and New Zealand as well as the COO position. All other markets in Asia Pacific will report to Lenovo China head Chen Xudong.

Peter Hortensius, who ran the Think Business Group is the new CTO and head of R&D. ®

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