CAIRO - Last week, Lenovo held a press conference to announce the introduction of the IdeaPad Tablet K1 to the Egyptian consumers. During the event, The Gazette caught up with Jack Lee, Corporate Vice President for Lenovo Middle East and Africa, to discuss the company's vision and strategy for the Egyptian market after the revolution. How far has Egypt's revolution affected Lenovo's expansion plans here? Surprisingly, the revolution has not affected our plans for Egypt in any way. I'm personally so optimistic about the Egyptian market's future and we are here to show long-term commitment to the local and regional market. We are currently increasing our investments in Egypt through opening an official office in the market as well as investing more and more in our partners, customers. By opening a new office this means you have set a target market share in the market, would you give us more details about this? Lenovo currently has 13 per cent market share in Egypt. We are targeting a 25 per cent market share and we are planning to achieve this number in one year only. We are here to be number one in the market. This means you are planning to almost double your market share in just one year, how are you going to do this? Our product lines include the legendary Think-branded commercial PCs and Idea-branded consumer PCs, as well as servers, work stations, and a family of mobile internet devices, including tablets and smart phones. This means that our portofolio caters to all the segments here. Thus, through creating customers' awareness about Lenovo itself, targeting SMBs as well as large enterprises mainly governmental organisations, which we already cooperate with some of them as the ministry of communications and information technology, we will rapidly achieve our target. Still, you will have to face a fierce competition from different competitors, especially the Chinese products that currently have the lion's market share in the local market because of their low prices, how are you going to face this? I can't agree more. No-one can claim that the competition is not strong, yet I highly believe in our products' quality so we will let the product speak for itself and its quality. Don't you think that now is not a good timing to introduce your new tablet to the market taking into consideration the current decreased consumers' purchasing power? On the contrary, the future is for tablets since they are easy to take everywhere. Tablets are extremely personal technology devices. That's why we've created a family of tablets that has something for everyone, including entertainment-friendly features and content for consumers, or business-friendly features to enhance productivity for professionals as well as security and manageability for IT Managers. The IdeaPad Tablet K1 is the first of our new tablet family to launch in the Egyptian market, providing a device that meets the needs of our customers for entertainment and leisure use. Your products are known for their relatively high prices, will you consider imposing certain discounts for the Egyptian consumers? As I've mentioned before, we have a full portfolio of products that cater for different segments of consumers ranging between large enterprises, SMBs and individual consumers. For the consumers' products, this is not true. Take for example today's newly introduced tablet; if you compare it to the competing ones, it's relatively cheap. It costs around 3,500 L.E although it is the company's first mobile Internet devices featuring the Android 3.1 platform. The Android-powered Lenovo tablet provides access to more than 250,000 apps in Android Market as well as apps tested for the Lenovo device in the Lenovo App Shop. Who provides after sales support to your customers here? We provide after sales support both through our call centre as well as our partners and both serve our customers allover the republic, not only Cairo.
