'Lenovo has never kept its eyes off innovation'

Rahul Agarwal
MD & CEO, Lenovo India
“In a world of technology that is fast evolving, Lenovo has always tried to keep itself updated with time. This is how we articulate our new strategy, which is the core of our PC business. While the world was wondering what is going to happen to the PC industry, we have gone on record multiple times saying that PC is just evolving and not a category which is dying. At Lenovo, we want to maintain our leadership position with good profitability in the PC segment. We became #1 in 2013 - 14 and for 17 quarters, we have improved our profitability year after year, which is a big deal in this segment. We have not kept our eyes off innovation. Lenovo’s ‘Think range’ has always remained at the forefront of innovation. With the PC Market going through ups and downs, Lenovo has built up a strong backbone. With speculations rife on whether PC users are going to move to tablets or smart-phones, my view is that if people are moving from laptops to tablets and phones, they would also move from phones to PCs, which is something we definitely foresee in this country.

And, this is the reason we expanded into Smartphones and Servers; we bought Motorola and we bought IBM’s server division in a gap of 10 days because we wanted to make the infrastructure ready first. While the hardware market is evolving, what is changing even faster is the way people use products, the way people consume data, the way people store and use applications and the whole convergence of devices. At Lenovo we continue to combine our strengths in devices with new capabilities in cloud and infrastructure to pursue our “Device + Cloud” vision. To make our vision a reality, we have a three wave strategy- to maintain leadership and strong profitability in our core PC and tablet businesses; to build our Mobile and Data Center businesses into new profit engines; to develop new smart devices, powered by the cloud and enriched with services, exploring smart home, smart office, smart healthcare and other areas and leveraging artificial intelligence, AR, VR and other new technologies.