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Lenovo officials are making more moves in the wake of recent disappointing financial numbers by making leadership changes in their PC and enterprise business units.
The company on Sept. 3 announced that Senior Vice President Tom Shell, who had led Lenovo’s PC Business Group, will now be in charge of the Enterprise Business Group, which includes servers, storage, networking and enterprise software. Senior Vice President Johnson Jia, a 20-year Lenovo veteran who previously had overseen the vendor’s PC and Enterprise Global Operations unit, will now run the PC business.
Guan Wei, who had been CEO of the manufacturing joint venture between Lenovo and Compal Electronics, will now be vice president overseeing the PC and Enterprise Global Operations business.
Gerry Smith, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Lenovo’s PC and Enterprise Business Group, said the personnel changes are a tribute to the company’s “deep bench of world-class leaders in this company.”
“With the management changes we’ve made today, we are giving some of our most-seasoned, effective leaders, significant opportunities to extend our leadership in the global PC market, while bringing sustainable growth to our enterprise business,” Smith said in a statement.
The moves come less than a month after Lenovo executives released quarterly numbers that they said were solid but didn’t meet their expectations. In the most recent quarter, Lenovo saw revenue hit $10.7 billion, a 3 percent increase from the same period last year, but net income fell 51 percent, to $105 million. The executives noted a number of challenges, from the continuing sales declines in the PC and tablet markets to increased competition in China.
Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang said in a statement at the time that Lenovo’s PC business increased its share of the market and that operations within the combined enterprise business were going well.
“But to build long-term, sustainable growth, we must take proactive and decisive actions in every part of the businesses,” the CEO said. “We will further integrate elements of the acquisitions with our legacy businesses in Mobile and Enterprise, while building the right business model and cost structure. We will reduce costs in our PC business and increase efficiency in order to leverage industry consolidation, increase share and improve profitability.”
Lenovo last week made its first step in that direction, increasing efficiencies by moving smartphone design, development and manufacturing responsibilities to Motorola.
The acquisitions Yang mentioned were the $2.1 billion it spent last year for IBM’s x86 server business and the $2.9 billion to buy the Motorola Mobility handset business from Google.