Lenovo sees growth protential in key sectors of the economy

The acquisition by the Lenovo Group of the IBM personal Computing Division is seen to widen the horizon of the new company - Lenovo, which now has products for both the corporate and consumer markets.

In an interview with Maria Victoria P. Agorrilla, country general manager of Lenovo Singapore - Philippine Office, she expressed a lot of optimism on the market most especially for certain industries in the Philippines.

Agorrilla said that their company hopes to ride on the projected growth of the telecommunications sector, the call centers, and the industrial or manufacturing sector. They are also looking into pushing their products to the local government units.

She explained that the IBM PC Division has been very strong among the corporate clients while the Lenovo Group is strong in the consumer products market. This will mean that Lenovo, the new company, will have a good complement for both the corporate and consumer clients.

The Lenovo Group acquired IBM's PC Division on December 2004 but the company started its operations in the Philippines on August last year.

The change means introducing the Lenovo brand to the Philippine market, which has gone very smoothly, said Agorrilla.

"We did not have any problem with the transition," she said. This is a view shared by Wilson Ng, president of Ng Khai Development Corp., which is a key partner of Lenovo in Cebu.

While currently, the focus is still on the sales to the corporate market, Agorrilla said that they would slowly, but surely also introduce products for the consumer market.

"We want to have a firm grip of it first before we do anything big."

She also said that they see very good opportunities in Cebu in the sectors that she has mentioned above.

The target areas, she said, will be the focus of their efforts. She is also bullish about the Information Technology (IT) industry seeing a 13 percent growth for 2006. "Next year, we look to an even higher growth of the IT sector."

Ng, for his part, said that since they have introduced the Lenovo products, they did not meet any major concern from their customers.

"Lenovo is an international company," Ng said. He also pointed out certain features of the PCs that set them apart from the other brands like the Active Protection System that parks your hard disk in case of accidents so that you will be able to salvage your data.

"Ng Khai is happy to be a partner of Lenovo since it works with our growth plan," Ng said.

Ng Khai has been focusing on the corporate market and has now gotten into the consumer market, which is very much supported by the technology offered by Lenovo.

"Lenovo has a lot of innovations for the consumer market," Ng added. "Innovation comes from everywhere."

Agorrilla said that with the popularity of clone PCs, the challenge of those selling the branded units is to eat into the share of the high-end clones using their low-end products to encourage people to buy computers backed by the reliability of the brand name they carry.

She added that technical support for Lenovo products covers practically the whole country with close to 300 accredited service centers nationwide.

She explained that all these service centers have passed stringent requirements to get their accreditation.