Lenovo has been keeping a low profile since buying IBM's personal computer business but it's using the occasion of the Olympic Winter Games in Turin, Italy, to thrust itself into the spotlight.
Although it's China's largest computer marketer, Lenovo has been little known in the U.S.
When it bought the IBM P.C. business for $1.25 billion it got the right to use the IBM logo for five years. But Lenovo executives have been itching to start shifting attention away from IBM and the Winter Games seemed like just the venue.
The company is supplying more than 6,000 PCs and servers throughout the Olympic sites, and is also running a big schedule of TV ads during the Olympic broadcasts. It will launch an extensive online and newspaper campaign later this month.
The ads focus on the ThinkPad notebooks which still carry the IBM logo but they're emphasizing technological improvements that Lenovo says it is adding to the legacy IBM products.
Heading up the Americanized Lenovo is Bill Amelio, a former executive of Dell Inc. and IBM.
