Channel delivers solid growth for Lenovo

Lenovo is looking to the channel to continue to build on the momentum of the last fiscal year and continue to deliver double digit growth.

The vendor wrapped up its fiscal year at the end of March and had given partners the target of growing 20% with the channel beating that number and coming in with a 34% year-on-year improvement.

Partners have been again given a 20% target for this fiscal year and Jane Ashworth, director of Channel & SMB at Lenovo, said that she was confident the channel could deliver.

"96% of our business goes through the channel and we are a channel centric organisation and we are not able to function without the blend of different partnerships we have with distribution and resellers," she added "Every single partner is adding value in their own way to different user segments and markets. It is important to us to ensure we are listening to our channel and understand what their requirements are to be able to deliver the Lenovo proposition to their users."

"Last year FY19 our target was 20% growth with our channel and we ended up growing by 34% y-o-y so we are extremely delighted with that result and so were our partners," she said.

She said that it was not just a transfer of business from one vendor to another but there was net new business with Lenovo driving a lot of investment generating leads from the mid-market user base.

The vendor has also increased the support for resellers with account managers available to talk to partners and that had also paid off.

"We are working from top to bottom and every single point of that [channel partner] hierarchy has a contact point to Lenovo whereas in previous years that may not have been the case if you were a smaller SME partner," she added that it had a 15-strong internal team helping managing the SMB partners and had also got account managers for distributors that are also working with those resellers.

"Over the past couple of years there has been an investment, in programmes and processes, and that has also supported that success," she added "We will continue to do that and we will continue to invest and have UK resource to do that."

Lenovo has seen its IDC and Context PC market share figures improve and the firm is looking to build on that progress. "Our ambition with our partner community is to grow by 20% this year and ultimately out ambition over the next two years is to become number one in the UK," said Ashworth.

She said that it was a steady process building momentum and it wanted to reach number one and keep hold of that position and there were still plenty of reasons for customers to keep investing in hardware: "The hot topic now is Windows 7 to 10 and the transition there and we are particularly focused on that."