ALKHOBAR, 7 March 2006 — According to Lenovo’s global management team, the first Lenovo-branded products have debuted worldwide. Debuted perhaps, but gone on sale in Saudi Arabia? Not yet. Why is that? Imtiaz Ghani, GM, Lenovo Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan, put forward many reasons why the company’s new computers haven’t been seen in the Kingdom. The bottomline is that here in Saudi Arabia, Lenovo hasn’t finished gearing up to face the market challenge.
Now before Lenovo starts shrieking over that comment, it is necessary to emphasize that Lenovo does have products in the local market. The ThinkPad and ThinkCentre brands, which formerly belonged to IBM, are now Lenovo’s. ThinkPad and ThinkCentre products are well-known to the business community in the Kingdom. What is missing however, are Lenovo-branded computers, especially those targeting small businesses and consumers.
Lenovo does have a six-part plan to address the Saudi market and the regional Lenovo team is insistent that Lenovo-branded products won’t be launched in the Kingdom until all aspects of that plan are in place. The company has now set up two offices in Saudi Arabia. Their Jeddah office opened a few months ago and their Riyadh office became operational March 1. Lenovo’s regional management is currently in the process of hiring the remainder of the team to be based in the Kingdom. They are only interested in hiring Saudis with some local market experience or expatriates with extensive experience in Saudi Arabia.
“We are not responding to this market as if it’s a hit-and-run case where we are opening only a sales office,” Ghani said. “We are actually gearing up operations for both sales and support. Recently we organized training for our existing business partners and new channel business partners who could be approved as authorized warranty service providers for Saudi Arabia. There were about 35 participants from the Kingdom who attended this training in Dubai. The training lasted for nearly three weeks, followed by examinations.”
In addition to the service centers already being operated by Lenovo’s Tier One business partners, who were formerly IBM’s partners, a few new service centers will be opened after training and certification has been completed.
Lenovo’s goal right now is to increase its brand recognition in the market. The company has been holding extensive promotions in Jeddah and Riyadh with more in the Eastern Province to follow. While Lenovo has been aggressively marketing its ThinkPad and ThinkCentre products, the marketing team understands that ThinkPad and ThinkCentre are best known by Saudi Arabia’s corporate buyers. Individuals, especially, younger consumers are interested in purchasing computers that have different features, designs and pricing than ThinkPad and ThinkCentre products.
“Before, 82 percent of our market share was coming from the corporate sector. It is difficult to take these machines into the consumer market. Once we have the Lenovo-branded machines designed to address the right market segment everyone will see the clear difference in our market share,” asserted Ghani.
With that in mind, Lenovo is working on several fronts to prepare the market for an influx of Lenovo-branded products. The company plans to sell extensively through hyper retailers. Lenovo is also looking at the education sector and hopes to bring certain universities on board with arrangements to make computers available to all students from those institutes of higher education.
“It is necessary to position Lenovo so that we bring in products that fit each segment of the market. We don’t want to have the brand everywhere and then find that we haven’t aligned the right product with the right segment and the right support,” Ghani said. “We still are facing the issue that when the market sees ThinkPad and ThinkCentre products they still think ‘IBM,’ even though it is now Lenovo making these products. With the right marketing, sales and support once we bring in the Lenovo-branded products with the Lenovo logos on the machines, Lenovo will find great success in Saudi Arabia. We are expecting that Lenovo-branded computers will enter the Saudi market within a month or two at most.”
