New York Times: For Olympics, Lenovo Steps Up to World Stage By Stephanie Clifford06/20/08With an Italiansounding name, a line of computers once made by I.B.M., and a chief executive who hails from Dell and NCR, the Lenovo Group is not a company that most Americans would assume is Chinese. And that is just fine with Lenovo, which happens to be the only Chinese company having a worldwide sponsorship for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Lenovo, which bought I.B.M.’s personal computer business in 2005, plans to use its Olympics campaign as a launching pad for its brand, which had once played understudy to the I.B.M. name. But it won’t exactly be highlighting its homefield advantage. Although Lenovo’s largest shareholder is the Chinese government and its biggest operations are in Beijing, Americans who watch ads during the Olympics this August will see only a company that wants to show off its technology. “In China, the advertising will be very much leveraging the heritage of a Chinese company,” said Glen Gilbert, Lenovo’s vice president for brand management. But “in the U.S., we won’t be making direct mention of that.”Lenovo is not trying to hide its Chinese roots, Mr. Gilbert said. Rather, it wants to position Lenovo as a global brand and highlight the quality of its computers. “In terms of priorities, we have so much more that we will be conveying,” he said.Whatever the intention, the strategy makes sense in light of the political outcry over Beijing as an Olympics host. The Olympic torch has served as a lightning rod for public anger over China’s policies in Tibet, Sudan and elsewhere, and Lenovo was the company that designed it. The torch is scheduled to arrive in Tibet on Saturday, though its stay there has been reduced to one day from three.American sponsors of the Summer Games — like CocaCola, General Electric, McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson and Visa — have been seeming to distance themselves from the host government, playing u