Definition: Lenovo

(Lenovo, Purchase, NY) Asia's largest PC manufacturer, founded in China in 1984 by Liu Chuanzhi from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In the late 1980s, the company, first known as Legend, introduced a circuit board that generated Chinese characters on Western-made PCs and launched China into the personal computer age. Its Pentium-based Conet PC in the late 1990s came bundled with a modem and access to the Internet.

In 2004, Lenovo acquired the personal computer division of IBM, making it one of the largest foreign acquisitions in Chinese history. It became owners of the legendary ThinkPad brand for laptop PCs and moved its executive headquarters to New York State. After the merger, Lenovo was owned by employees, shareholders, the Chinese government, the U.S.-based Texas Pacific Group and IBM.

Two years after the PC acquisition, Lenovo began to sell ThinkPads under its own brand for the first time and has done very well with the line. Lenovo preserved the ThinkPad's extraordinary keyboard quality in its top-of-the-line models, which is why the only laptops ever considered by many writers and journalists are Lenovos. In 2014, Lenovo acquired IBM's System x series of rack-mounted, tower and blade servers.