Short History of Lenovo

Short History of Lenovo

Lenovo Group Ltd. Is a Chinese multinational computer technology company with headquarters in Beijing, China, and Morrisville, North Carolina, United States. It designs, develops, manufactures and sells personal computers, tablet computers, smartphones, workstations, servers, electronic storage devices, IT management software and smart televisions. 

In 2013, Lenovo was the world's largest personal computer vendor by unit sales. It markets the ThinkPad line of notebook computers and the ThinkCentre line of desktops.
"Lenovo" is a portmanteau of "Le-" (from Legend) and "novo", Latin ablative for "new".


Liu founded Lenovo in 1984 with a group of ten engineers in Beijing with 200,000 yuan. Lenovo officially states that it was founded on 1 November 1984. Lenovo's incorporation was approved by the Chinese government on the same day. 

Jia Xufu, one of the founders of Lenovo, indicates the first meeting in preparation for starting the company was held on 17 October of the same year. Eleven people, the entirety of the initial staff, attended. Each of the founders were middle-aged members of the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In May 1988, Lenovo placed its first advertisement seeking employees. The ad was placed on the front page of the China Youth News. Such ads were quite rare in China at this time. Out of 500 respondents, 280 were selected to take a written employment exam. 120 of these candidates were interviewed in person. 

Although interviewers initially only had authority to hire 16 people, 58 were given offers. The new staff included 18 people with graduate degrees, 37 with undergraduate degrees, and three students with no university-level education. Their average age was 26. Yang Yuanqing was among this group.

Lenovo became publicly traded after a 1994 Hong Kong listing that raised nearly US$30 million.