Lenovo’s Legend Returns..docVIP

Lenovo’s Legend Returns. Liu Chuanzhi built China’s first global computer company. Now he’s rebuilding it. As China’s economy gains ever greater global influence, its major corporations dream of conquering international markets. Liu Chuanzhi and Lenovo have been at the forefront of that quest. With Liu at the helm, Lenovo became China’s first truly multinational corporation after its $1.75 billion acquisition of IBMs famed PC unit in 2005. When the deal closed, Liu gave up the chairman job and let the new Sino-American leadership team take over. The acquisition, it turned out, was the easy part. Lenovo eventually became entangled in a struggle over the combined company’s managerial culture. The internecine intrigue would prove costly. Lenovo’s market share stagnated because the company wasn’t adapting to new trends in personal computing. Lenovo’s problems are a looming challenge for corporate China in general. Since few Chinese executives have had meaningful experience operating outside the country, transforming their global aspirations into reality will be a difficult task. “Going global is going to be a big, big issue for Chinese companies,” says James McGregor, senior counselor for consulting firm APCO Worldwide in Beijing. Liu, 66, intends to fix all that. After four years on the sidelines, he took back control of Lenovo’s management last year from its command-control American CEO and recast Lenovo as a global company with a consensus-style Chinese management structure. If that wasn’t daunting enough, Liu has set his sights on another grand undertaking, to create an industrial conglomerate in China. His game plan: to pass the lessons learned over his career to a new generation of Chinese CEOs and upgrade corporate management in the country. In the future, China’s “potential will be driven by companies and [their] people,” Liu says. “What we’ll do is help the top management to improve.” He is already the wise man of Chinese private enterprise, a soft-spoken but r