Lenovo

(Lenovo, Purchase, NY, www.lenovo.com) Asia's largest PC manufacturer, founded in China in 1984 by Liu Chuanzhi from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In the late 1980s, the company, first known as Legend, introduced a circuit board that generated Chinese characters on Western-made PCs and launched China into the personal computer age. Its Pentium-based Conet PC in the late 1990s came bundled with a modem and access to the Internet.

In 2004, Lenovo acquired the personal computer division of IBM, making it one of the largest foreign acquisitions in Chinese history. It became owners of the legendary ThinkPad brand for laptop PCs and moved its executive headquarters to New York state. After the merger, Lenovo was owned by employees, shareholders, the Chinese government, the U.S.-based Texas Pacific Group and IBM.

In 2006, the company launched its first self-branded product line since the IBM PC acquisition. Aimed at small business owners normally catered to by Dell and HP, its 3000 family featured a desktop PC for $349 and a $599 laptop.