CHINESE CHECKERS: HOW LENOVO STAYED SAFE

A former senior executive in the India office said that the mandate was clear -Lenovo had to be known for its global operating style and outlook

- Gulveen Aulakh

On 29 June 2020, two weeks after Indian and Chinese troops brutally clashed at the Galwan Valley, India's ministry of electronics and IT said it was pulling the plug on 58 Chinese apps operational in the country. Among them was TikTok—the short-form video app was hugely popular back then, with over 200 million users in India. A detailed statement explained the move: The ministry had received complaints about misuse; the apps were "stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India".

In the years that followed, more Chinese companies came under scrutiny. The Enforcement Directorate, the agency which fights economic crimes, seized over ₹5,500 crore worth of Xiaomi India's assets after a probe found that the smartphone maker made illegal remittances to foreign entities while showing them as royalty payments. The agency also alleged that Vivo, another Chinese mobile handset maker, siphoned off ₹70,000 crore from India under the guise of imports. And earlier this year, some China-backed fintech firms were searched as part of a money laundering case.

In the middle of all this, one Chinese electronics company with sizable operations in India managed to stay safe and below-the-radar: Lenovo. It didn't find itself in the law's crosshairs.

What did Lenovo do that Xiaomi and Vivo did not?

Before we answer, let's look at Lenovo's history and its current operations, in India and across the world.

IDEA IN A DUSTY ROOM

In a dusty room in Beijing, in 1984, Liu Chuanzhi and 10 other researchers from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences founded a company called Legend.