Lenovo Group Ltd, the world's third-largest personal-computer maker, has begun selling computers under its own name outside China for the first time since buying International Business Machines Corp's PC unit.

Two Lenovo desktop PCs and three laptops aimed at businesses with fewer than 100 employees went on sale on Thursday, Lenovo told reporters in New York. Half the PCs will run on chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc, a setback to Intel Corp's attempts to shore up its market share.

The Lenovo-branded computers are trying to help Chief Executive Officer William Amelio build name recognition as he battles bigger rivals Dell Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co for a larger share of the small-business market. Before, Lenovo sold only products inherited from IBM - such as the ThinkPad notebook - outside China. Those products target large and medium-size businesses.

"We've seen Lenovo transform from a dominant regional vendor to a Tier 1 worldwide PC vendor," said Matthew Wilkins, a Bracknell, England-based senior analyst with market researcher iSuppli.

Lenovo's decision to use more Advanced Micro chips is a further boost to market share gains by Intel's only rival in PC microprocessors. Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro passed 20 per cent of the market for the key component of computers in the fourth quarter for the first time in four years.

Lenovo desktop PCs, which start at US$349, are the first the company is selling outside China with Advanced Micro chips. Its ThinkCenter desktop line and ThinkPad laptops use Intel chips exclusively. Lenovo PCs with the Advanced Micro chips are available in 11 markets, including the United States, Mexico, Brazil, France, India, Australia and New Zealand, said Bryan Thomas, worldwide product manager for Lenovo's new J series PCs.

"We're excited about the relationship and will be working with Lenovo to expand the product line in the near future," said Bart Arnold, Advanced Micro's worldwide consumer product marketing manager. The company had no laptop or server business with Lenovo.

Samuel Dusi, executive director of marketing for Lenovo's notebook business, said the company continues to consider using Advanced Micro processors in its Think-branded products.

The Lenovo-branded computers include customer care software reachable with one button and functions that let users quickly back up and restore data and get help.

"The small-business customer has been saying, `We don't want to worry about our computers; we want to worry about our business,'" Thomas said.

Lenovo began as a Chinese company, and Asia accounts for more than half its PC shipments. The company has about a 15 per cent share of the large-enterprise market and about 6 per cent in the small-business segment globally, Lenovo said today.

Laptops bearing the Lenovo brand start at US$599 and PCs with flat-panel monitors sell for US$349 to US$499. Lenovo-branded products will probably be sold at Office Depot Inc stores in the US alongside Think-branded machines. Lenovo began selling ThinkPad notebooks at Office Depot stores in November.

The new machines are available today through other resellers and through the Lenovo website.

"They can't invest in IBM any more because they don't own that brand, so the sooner they get away from that the better," Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc in Wayland, Massachusetts, said in an interview.

A second series of laptops with wide screens will be introduced in March, and another series will be available in the second quarter.

Source: China Daily