LENOVO’S CONQUEST OF THE WESTERN MARKET
Can a Chinese company become dominant in the international market?
Introduction
The context of current globalization is a great challenge for companies having worldwide ambitions. It forces them to set up viable business strategies to adapt new environments characterized by a new culture in fields such as management, research and development, human resources… Thus, it questions the firm’s original strategy, its consistency, its cohesion and its ability to adapt a new market: to what extent must the firm change its way of doing business? And how will it obtain its economic returns? As Lenovo seeks to enter new businesses and market outside China, we will use this firm to illustrate the challenges implied in such a deal: the main issue being:
to what extent Lenovo’s aspiration to being international will force it to gradually change its business strategy so far as to integrate the American IBM and what are the issues at stake for the future?
Thus, it raises such questions as: can two corporate cultures be successfully integrated? Will the Chinese particularistic environment prevent Lenovo from being well integrated in the rest of the world, especially in the western market? To what extent will it adapt? To what extent will it keep its distinctive feature in such a competitive market?
We will first analyse what the Chinese features of Lenovo are and how it is integrated in a particularistic environment. Then we will turn our attention to Lenovo’s special strategy that sets it apart from a typical Chinese company and opens it to the worldwide market. That will lead us to focus on Lenovo-IBM’s merger, which can be considered as the concretization of Lenovo’s international ambition and, which f ...