In a deal worth $404 million, private investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings Group announced it has purchased 29% of Legend Holdings. Legend Holdings currently owns 42% of Lenovo’s stock, which gives Oceanwide about 12% stake in Lenovo.

Public shareholders make up 50.4%, while the remaining stock is distributed among Lenovo’s directors (0.7%) and U.S. investors TPG Capital, General Atlantic LLC, and NewBridge Capital LLC (6.6% total).

With such a relatively small change in ownership any radical changes in the company’s direction are unlikely, especially considering the positive direction it has taken lately.

Source: [Reuters] and [LocalTechWire]

ITWorld brings us news that pirated copies of Windows 7 are on sale at PC bazaars in China. Please pause while I gasp in shock. Thank you.

Reports are saying that you can buy a copy for less than $6 USD, although the burned discs have no indication or pretense of what they are supposed to contain. Buyers supposedly only get an image file of the pirated OS, leaving the user to do all the work of burning the image and installing from there.

These pirated copies may make use of the Lenovo OEM key, which was used to hack Windows 7 RTM, given that the crack was originally posted on a Chinese forum. There is also a large concern of the pirated media being loaded with malware, a common practice to steal user information.

It also appears that pirated copies of Windows 7 are not terribly common yet in the Chinese PC bazaars, due to fear of punishment by the government. With the World Expo being held in Beijing next year, Chinese authorities might be cracking down on blatant piracy, especially around such a hot item as Windows 7 that stands to be important to several large computer manufacturers operating within China.

Source: [ITWorld]

The Chinese Academy of Sciences Holding Company owns 65% of Legend, the investment holdings company who funded the creation of Lenovo, and is looking to sell the majority of that stake.

They are looking to sell 29% of their stake in Legend, and might take it even lower after 2010. For those unfamiliar with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it is a national academy for natural sciences in China and is responsible for the creation or investment in hundreds of corporations, including Lenovo.

It is unclear whether this is in response to their own economic needs or Lenovo’s poor fiscal performance, but this could open up good or bad doors for our troubled ThinkPad maker.

Source: [The Register]

For those unfamiliar with the Green Dam software, it is a program designed for use on PC’s in China that will prevent users from seeing unauthorized content. The word “green” in Chinese refers to web browsing free of porn and other “illicit” content. The announcement prompted a huge amount of attention from the international community, everyone from the Computer and Communications Industry Association to PC manufacturers to governments.

Aside from its contentious objective, Green Dam has also caused a series of other debacles. Severe vulnerabilities were found in the software by a group at the University of Michigan, proclaiming the software allows “any web site a user visits [to] exploit this problem to take control of the computer” and they “continue to recommend that users protect themselves by uninstalling Green Dam immediately.”

If all this weren’t enough, software firm Solid Oak Software, Inc. is alledging that Green Dam contains stolen portions of its own program, CyberSitter. The same group from the University of Michigan confirmed they did find keyword blacklists taken directly from CyberSitter, although those have been deactivated (but not removed) in the latest version of the software. Solid Oak Software is moving to stop PC manufacturers from distributing PC’s with the software.

As a final point of clarification, PC manufacturers are not required to actually install or activate the software on the PC. They must only include the installation file on the hard drive or provide it on CD for the end user to install themselves.

Source: [Multiple cited within article] ]]> http://www.thinkpads.com/2009/07/02/lenovo-acer-sony-others-complying-with-chinas-green-dam-program/feed/ 1 http://www.thinkpads.com/2009/03/16/lenovo-concept-notebook-revealed-yoga/ http://www.thinkpads.com/2009/03/16/lenovo-concept-notebook-revealed-yoga/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:09:41 +0000 John Hobbes http://www.thinkpads.com/?p=270

Last week we talked about a decidedly Sony-looking concept notebook from Lenovo, and today it is revealed, albeit a little anti-climatically. It turns out this not a sexy new top-secret device waiting to be unleashed, but a 2 year old concept machine – unlikely to see the light of day. Johnson Li, from Lenovo’s Beijing design center, has written up a post over at Lenovo’s Design Matters blog.

We in Lenovo’s Beijing design center refer to this concept as the “Pocket Yoga,” an extension of an award winning design we’ve shown in public based on a folding concept inspired by the practice of yoga by one of our New Zealand-based designers. The full Yoga concept was a folding notebook with a detachable keyboard. The system unit was covered in leather.

Pocket Yoga is shaped just like a large wallet. You can easily put it into your pocket. The proportion of length and width is about the maximum size for a notebook that can fit into a pocket, or, as we like to say, it is the smallest pocket notebook.

Click here to read the full post for details on the Yoga and click here to see more pictures of it.

In yet another sign of the times, Lenovo has been forced to cut some of its jobs in China related to its global support services.

“While our business in China remains very strong, many of our global support functions have employees based in China. Although difficult, these reductions are a necessary part of our response to the global economic downturn,” said new company CEO Yang Yuanqing.

Last month the company laid off 2500 employees and earlier this month former CEO William Amelio stepped down amidst declining sales reports. This isn’t the first management change in recent years – in 2008 Stephen Ward, the former IBM exec who was appointed CEO after Lenovo’s deal with the company, stepped down as well.

Although they are not giving up international expansion, Lenovo will now be focusing a little more on China and emerging markets than their original plans called for. With a little luck, it may help the company weather this global recession.