Protect And Attack: Lenovo's New Strategy
17.05.12
Ust west of the Bird's Nest , that architectural jewel of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, rises an electronics district of Olympic proportions. It's called Zhongguancun, and if you need a computer or smartphone or camera or any other digital device when in China's capital, this is the place to go. Hundreds of mostly compact stores crowd the complex's dozen glass towers as tightly as commuters on the subway at rush hour. It's like a year-round Consumer Electronics Show, with every major brand, from Apple to HP to Dell to Sony, vying for attention and sales.
But one brand is nearly ubiquitous: Lenovo. In the U.S., we think a couple of Starbucks located a block apart is overkill. Here in Beijing's high-tech mecca, the Chinese computer maker doesn't have three stores or even three dozen: Lenovo has 100 stores in just this one shopping area. Some are so close together you can walk out of one store and see two more, one to the left, beyond the street vendors cooking pork on portable grills, and another straight ahead, just past the sea of parked bikes. The bigger Lenovo locations offer the gamut of products--laptops, desktops, netbooks, notebooks, tablets, smartphones--while the smaller ones cater to niches, say, small-business owners or young consumers. Outside the Zhongguancun towers, a Times Square-size digital screen continually plays the company's ads. A third of the computers sold in the district are Lenovos, roughly approximating its market share in the whole of China, where it is by far the No. 1 seller of PCs. Its network of 15,000-plus stores reaches into the most remote of villages. That's almost as many locations as Starbucks has in the entire world--and roughly 14,700 more stores than Apple has.
Source: Fast Company