Q. Can you describe what Lenovo is and what its aims are for the post IBM PC group future?
A. Financially, what we've done is sold our PC business to Lenovo. Lenovo is in PCs and in other businesses like cell phones. The entire Lenovo company and the PC company will all be part of one new company we call the "new Lenovo." Its name will just be Lenovo. That company is headquartered in New York -- it's not a headquarters in Raleigh, it's not a headquarters in Beijing -- it's headquartered in Armonk. The senior management team will be here, including myself, including Yuanqing Yang, who will be our nonexecutive chairman. We'll be here. We'll work, of course, with our customers, with both of our principal operations in Raleigh and in Beijing and with IBM.
We will reincorporate the company. It'll be incorporated, most likely in the Netherlands or possibly in New York. I want you to think of this as an international company -- a publicly held company -- as it is today.
So it'll be another international brand, just like IBM was before, and Dell and HP are now?
Exactly. And very, very global. The thing that's very interesting about this is [that] our market share, combined, in China is bigger than anybody's market share in the United States. Everyone keeps saying, "Oh, the United States; you've got people that are so dominant you can't possibly beat them." But that's in a market that's not growing and is very saturated.
We're in a market [in China] that's unsaturated and growing like crazy. We have this huge share, so it's kind of interesting to look at that.
How will the integration affect your employees and customers?
Let me take customers first. Lenovo is exceptionally strong in Asia and China particularly, in retail [where they have 4,000 stores], and in small business. They also have a good large business, but they're really strong in consumer and in small business. We're not strong there at all. They don't sell outside of Asia, so there's no conflict outside of Asia.
If you just look at employees... sales, marketing, management, development, research, back-office, finance -- everything other than manufacturing employees -- we have 200 employees in China and Lenovo has basically no employees outside of China.
What's the integration plan for the United States? It's real simple. All the Lenovo employees in the United States are IBM employees. What's the integration plan in Japan? It's IBM [employees becoming Lenovo employees]. There's nothing really to integrate is the point.
Talkback
Staying in New York, who can cotrol East Asian operation? Stephen Ward and his staff should move to China. What Asian customers need is not a "fantasy" but a quality production tool.