Author/ Author of "Finance and Economics" Weekly Wu Di
Editor/ You Yong
On the first day of the 2022 New Year, Lenovo released a brand video of "Wisdom Mountains and Rivers" that caused widespread dissemination and heated discussion. The video tells the story of the changes that are taking place in The land of China: from private schools on the banks of the Yellow River to smart classrooms, from traditional farming to smart agriculture, from traditional papermaking to modern intelligent manufacturing, from sea lighthouses to smart cities...
These stories and pictures run through many areas of Lenovo Wisdom's service to the social economy, constituting Lenovo's narrative of the future and the answer sheet that Lenovo is writing.
At present, the wave of digitalization and intelligence has formed a trend of storms, from helping the transformation of the real economy to narrowing the digital divide, which is an opportunity for the real economy and a new growth point for all enterprises with transformation empowerment capabilities. Technology companies represented by Lenovo are contributing their wisdom and underlying capabilities.
As Chinese society is about to usher in the tide of intelligent transformation, Lenovo is relying on innovative technology and 38 years of experience to transform the profound accumulation of its own digital practice into external competitiveness. This traditional PC manufacturer has also opened a new journey and a new narrative.
As the video says: "Give the power of wisdom to China upwards."
Intelligence on the eve of the outbreak
Today's world is experiencing changes unprecedented in a century. The intelligent upgrading of the integration of a new generation of digital technology and the real economy has become the trend of the times.
As the domestic economy shifts from high-speed growth to high-quality development, the full integration of enterprises and digital technologies is considered to be an inevitable way to face the industry subversion and opportunities brought about by economic and industrial restructuring, resource and environmental challenges, and digital technologies and innovations. Using digital technologies, industries can improve economic efficiency, reduce operating costs, and achieve high-quality growth.
At present, the digital economy has become the main source of economic growth momentum in the world. According to a report released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the global digital economy accounts for more than 40% of GDP in 2020, and all countries are accelerating the improvement of the digital economy layout.
The White Paper on the Development of China's Digital Economy (2020) predicts that the overall scale of China's digital economy is expected to grow from 47.56 trillion yuan to 83.19 trillion yuan from 2021 to 2025, with nearly 40 trillion yuan of growth space.
The digital economy has become a key force in reshaping competitive advantage, and China sees it as one of its national strategies. The outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan proposes that the added value of the core industries of the digital economy will increase the proportion of GDP from 7.8% in 2020 to 10%. This means that the digital economy is of great significance and weight in the development strategy of the country.
On April 20, 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission for the first time clarified the scope of "new infrastructure", including information infrastructure, converged infrastructure and innovation infrastructure, focusing on the core technologies in the four new infrastructures of 5G, artificial intelligence, data centers and industrial Internet, which are the key to the development of the digital economy.
Behind digitalization and intelligence is also the need for supply-side reform. Promoting supply-side structural reform is considered to be the root cause of economic structural transformation. Reducing ineffective and low-end supply, expanding effective and high-end supply, and enhancing the adaptability and flexibility of the supply structure to changes in demand are crucial to unleashing the potential of economic development.
The rapid development of new industries, new formats and new models characterized by the "digital economy" has provided strong support for economic recovery during the epidemic. According to a set of data released by the China Association of Small and Medium-sized Commercial Enterprises, the proportion of enterprises with high digital maturity in the three months under the impact of the epidemic reached 60%, while the proportion of enterprises with relatively low digital maturity was only 48%.
To a large extent, the epidemic has accelerated the urgent need for digital transformation of enterprises, because everyone has found that the degree of digitalization even directly affects the living space.
The maturity of technology is also promoting the landing of digitalization and intelligence. In fact, digitalization is not a new concept, as scholars proposed in the 1990s. But the technical conditions underpinning digitalization have never been more mature. Including the Internet of Things, cloud computing, edge computing, artificial intelligence and other technologies continue to achieve breakthroughs and popularization, especially the commercial use of 5G, to create conditions for the Internet of Things, massive terminal equipment into the network generated huge data will lay the foundation for intelligent changes in the industry.
From this point of view, intelligence will show the unique charm of science and technology. As the Academy of Information and Communications Technology emphasized in its latest blue book on the digital transformation of enterprises, for all walks of life, digital transformation is no longer a "choice question", but a "compulsory course" related to survival and long-term development.
Lenovo reached the finals
In the face of the general trend, those who can seize the opportunity are all manufacturers with foundation and foresight.
In 2017, Lenovo China officially implemented two transformations, one is the "customer-centric" transformation for the continuous growth of the old PC business, and the other is the 3S transformation (improving the business revenue of smart products, intelligent infrastructure and smart services) looking for a second growth engine. The perception of Lenovo from the outside world has gradually changed: Lenovo is not only the world's largest PC manufacturer, but also a supplier of intelligent services and solutions.
This transformation has paid off and proven.
According to the financial report data of Lenovo Group in the first half of 2021, the turnover of the SSG solution service business group that Lenovo just spun off in early 2021 reached 8.82 billion yuan, an increase of 30% year-on-year; Lenovo China's 3S new business was even more brilliant, and the proportion of revenue in the overall revenue of China climbed to 26.6%. Specifically, the revenue of the three major sectors of smart products, smart infrastructure and smart services increased by 122%, 45% and 52% respectively year-on-year.
According to IDC data, Lenovo has entered the top 4 in the ranking of non-operator market manufacturers of IT services in China, which is a rapid improvement over a few years ago. Four years ago, Lenovo was still ranked 8th.
At the financial report meeting for the first half of 2021, Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, happily told the outside world that by vigorously promoting the 3S strategy, Lenovo achieved record performance. At the same time, he stressed that Lenovo will continue to increase research and development, investment and innovation, and further promote service-oriented intelligent transformation.
In fact, it is not only Lenovo that sees opportunities, but giants including Huawei, Ali, and Tencent have also been deeply involved in the digitalization of government and enterprises for many years. Moreover, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei's enterprise service business are all new businesses that are growing rapidly at their respective companies.
Today, Alibaba Cloud is continuing to promote the "cloud nail integration" strategy, and Tencent Cloud is landing the "Thousand Sails Plan", and both have made some progress. Everyone adopts the "integrated ecology" approach, from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS, and finally achieves ecological closed loop.
Lenovo not only has services from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS, but more importantly, it proposes smart services based on the "new IT" architecture. In the past, the traditional IT architecture was "cloud-pipe-end", and the data of all terminals was led to the cloud through a network pipe, where it was stored, calculated, analyzed, and then transmitted back to the results. However, this traditional architecture is no longer sufficient in the 5G era, and it is difficult to withstand the strong load formed by tens of billions of IoT terminal access.
The new IT solution proposed by Lenovo is through the "end-edge-cloud-network-intelligence" architecture, and all elements are coordinated. Among them, the "end" is the terminal of the intelligent IoT device Smart Iot, the "edge" is edge computing, the "cloud" is cloud computing, the "network" is the data transmission network represented by 5G, the "side-cloud-network" constitutes an intelligent infrastructure, and the "smart" is the solution of industry intelligence.
In the "Blueskin Report on Enterprise Digital Transformation (2021)", the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology clearly stated that the new IT represented by "End-edge Cloud Network Intelligence" will promote the intergenerational revolution of infrastructure in the digital era: "The new IT empowers the real economy, can deepen the deep integration of the real economy and the service industry, innovate the form of production organization, realize the digitization of the whole industrial chain, the whole value chain and the whole scenario, and become the engine of China's economic transformation and upgrading." ”
Lenovo's practice of intelligent transformation is the best example of growth based on new technology architecture, Lenovo has all the elements of 'end-edge cloud network intelligence', which is an advantage that many giants do not have.
Moreover, compared with other Internet or technology companies, Lenovo has been dealing with manufacturing for the past 38 years. As the world's first PC manufacturer, it is a user, developer and operator of large computing power. In high-performance computing, edge computing, cloud computing and other related fields, the accumulation is deep. At the same time, the experience of continuous innovation and change in the PC business in the past also provides a path reference for the exploration of Lenovo's service business.
In April 2021, based on the new IT architecture of "end-edge-cloud-network-intelligence", Lenovo officially launched the intelligent engine "DynaSky". It is an endogenous product of Lenovo, and it is also an important starting point for Lenovo externalization to empower customers to intelligently transform and upgrade.
Perhaps compared with Huawei, Ali and Tencent, Lenovo still has some gaps in the scale of the company, but in the matter of digital services, Lenovo undoubtedly stands in the same echelon as Huawei and Ali. Compared with the high concentration of the Internet, the enterprise service market is still relatively scattered. At present, the overall share of the first few manufacturers accounts for less than one-fifth.
The industry expects that as the market matures, the market concentration will also strengthen. This also means that the competition of local service providers such as Huawei, Lenovo, and Ali will become increasingly fierce. But now, they are all on the road of digital and intelligent transformation, standing on the same running line.
Endogenous "superheroes"
Behind a successful strategic transformation, it often stems from its own huge needs.
For example, JD Cloud was first used to solve the needs of JD.com's huge retail business, and the e-commerce promotion provided the best training ground for JD Cloud. At first, Feishu was also to solve the need for 100,000 people inside Byte to work together. Nowadays, Feishu has long been exported to the outside world, trying to get a share of DingTalk and enterprise WeChat.
This kind of case of "coming from practice and using it in the business" is more common in the innovative business of major enterprises. Like DynaSky mentioned above, Lenovo China's core capabilities of wisdom empowerment also come from the accumulation and precipitation in the process of its own business transformation.
Over the years, Lenovo has accumulated diversified technologies and capabilities in various fields of "end-edge-cloud-network-intelligence", and has various element assets needed to build industry intelligence. In addition, Lenovo's own rich business scenarios and practical experience have also perfectly verified and optimized these capabilities and innovative achievements.
In 2017, lenovo's PC business began to implement a direct customer business model in order to break through the industry ceiling. This is a "customer-centric" model transformation, changing the organizational method that used to be divided by product lines into a customer segment.
The core change it brings is to help Lenovo effectively find the pain points of each type of customer segment, as well as the contact points with Lenovo, thereby driving pc sales. Lenovo can maintain the first position in the PC market all year round, behind which it does not only rely on market inertia, but also has many products and models that the outside world cannot see.
This set of service concepts has been copied to the business of enterprise digital transformation.
Before serving other companies to digitally transform, Lenovo Group's own manufacturing business also faced many challenges. It can be said that Lenovo has played a leading role in promoting the intelligent ability of the industry through its own intelligent manufacturing practice.
Lenovo has 36 factories, more than 2,000 core suppliers, 600 product lines around the world, more than 200,000 product preferences, including PCs, mobile phones and servers, and annual shipments are about 130 million. Behind this figure is Lenovo's customers of more than 1 billion customers around the world, supporting shipping orders in more than 180 countries, and processing more than 4 million orders per year.
In the whole development process, from supply chain to manufacturing, complex systems, complex links, challenges are everywhere. How to better manage, how to order production on demand, and how to quickly respond to changes in market demand to create a resilient, agile and coordinated supply chain, including green production, energy conservation and emission reduction and other challenges, many problems need to be solved.
For example, Lenovo processes tens of thousands of customer personalized orders every day, most of which are less than five, so dispersed and uncertain to have a great impact on capacity and quality. According to statistics, the proportion of non-performing due to personnel problems accounted for about 75% of Lenovo's quality loss.
In 2013, Lenovo launched an intelligent transformation with data intelligence as the core. Through the combination of business and technology, using cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and automation, Lenovo has realized the intelligent transformation of the supply chain. It not only includes the digital drive from order management to warehouse management, but also covers the intelligence of all intermediate links such as scheduling decision-making, intelligent production, quality inspection, intelligent logistics, etc., and finally realizes intelligent manufacturing covering the whole chain and the whole process.
Such a goal comes from Yang Yuanqing's concept many years ago: intelligent manufacturing is not only the intelligence of the manufacturing link, but the intelligence of the whole chain and the whole process. True intelligent manufacturing needs to connect R&D, production, supply, sales, and service, and according to customer needs, design and development, procurement of components, organization of production, precision marketing, and provide personalized services of the whole process.
Lenovo has created eighteen martial arts in the field of intelligent manufacturing. Taking intelligent scheduling as an example, Lenovo's factory scheduling time has been shortened from 6 hours to 1.5 minutes, and production efficiency has also increased by 16%. Through comprehensive energy efficiency management, a factory in Wuhan can save 6.38 million kWh of electricity a year, which is equivalent to planting 12,000 trees per year.
This is the potential and charm of intelligent manufacturing, and the effect is obvious to all.
More critically, Lenovo has produced the "DynaSky-Optimus" intelligent IT engine in this process, as the grasp of Lenovo's intelligent transformation, "DynaSky" relies on Lenovo's unique "end-side-cloud-network-intelligence" global intelligent architecture, which is the core engine of Lenovo's intelligent transformation in China. Liu Jun, executive vice president of Lenovo Group and president of Lenovo China, called it "the superhero in Transformers".
The "superhero" metaphor is not an exaggeration. DynaSky engine contains a number of super middle platform modules that have been born through Lenovo's own transformation, with a powerful engine driving force. For example, Lenovo Wisdom Cube System is a smart customer service middle office product. Since the launch of the smart Cube customer service system, Lenovo customer service has achieved 7 * 24 hours uninterrupted, the robot resolution rate accounted for more than 55%, and the praise rate has always remained above 92%. With DynaSky as the core, Lenovo has entered a new cycle of intelligent development.
Accelerate the push to the land of China
Whether endogenous capabilities work or not ultimately depends on external customers.
In fact, Lenovo China has also relied on the "end-edge-cloud-network-smart" technology architecture and the "DynaSky" intelligent IT engine over the years to create a number of benchmark cases of intelligent transformation.
For example, the "Rubik's Cube" intelligent customer service system based on DynaSky core not only serves Lenovo itself, but also attracts external customers, including Ping An of China. In 2020, after deploying the "Rubik's Cube" intelligent customer service system, Ping An of China realized a 7×24h artificial intelligence + manual consulting service + hotline service, and customers can access the service from the phone and Ping An mobile app. In addition, based on the characteristics of customer service in the financial industry, artificial intelligence modules such as business intelligence recommendation, user sentiment analysis and intelligent matching are deployed.
Located in Ningnan County, deep in the mountains of Sichuan, there is a shortage of educational resources and backward teaching equipment. Lenovo donated 13 sets of smart classrooms, which are equipped with smart hardware terminal equipment such as smart tablets and interactive live broadcast screens, combined with corresponding teaching and auxiliary software and content, and rely on cloud computing platforms, on the one hand, to provide teachers with systematic teaching tools and content libraries; on the other hand, to help students create a personalized learning experience.
Many companies in the manufacturing sector have also become the beneficiaries of Lenovo's "endogenous externalization". For example, Shaanxi Heavy Duty Truck, as the leader of the equipment manufacturing industry, Shaanxi Heavy Duty Truck also has hardships, and the challenges focus on a series of technical baggage such as business quality traceability difficulties, low efficiency, and high bicycle claim costs.
In August 2019, Lenovo established a data center with data lake as the core for Shaanxi Heavy Duty Truck. The platform brings together nearly 500 core business table data from 10 business systems, uses parallel processing technology, can uniformly process structured and unstructured data, supports the algorithms of various machine models including deep learning methods, and quickly and efficiently finds relevant data.
In 2020, shaanxi heavy duty truck's bicycle failure rate decreased by 72% compared with 2016, and the amount of bicycle claims decreased by 77%, reducing the comprehensive quality cost of products by more than 20%. The investment in digitalization has brought very considerable returns to Shaanxi National Heavy Duty Truck.
Still in Shaanxi, Lenovo has customized a smart apple planting solution for local apple growing companies. From the selection of planting bases to soil water safety, pesticide management, etc. to implement comprehensive management standards, through the construction of micro-weather stations, the installation of various types of sensing equipment, the growth environment of apples for all-round monitoring, and through in-depth data analysis, put forward scientific planting guidance, greatly improving the planting level and income of fruit farmers.
In the construction of a new smart city, Lenovo can also be seen. In Xiamen, Lenovo has created an e-government platform through the combination of software and hardware and services to help local governments achieve smart government affairs, make it more convenient for the masses to do things, and improve the efficiency of government services. Through the deployment of a large number of all-in-one machines, the time spent on queuing and running errands at the window of the local people has been significantly reduced.
From Xiamen in Fujian, Yanqing in Beijing, Jiading in Shanghai, Wenchang in Hainan, and then to Xianghe in Hebei, Lenovo's new smart city construction practice has blossomed everywhere. Lenovo is accelerating the promotion of smart services to the land of China.
As a technology enterprise rooted in China for 38 years, intelligence is not only a business opportunity, but also a mission given to the enterprise by the process of the times. Lenovo has been taking the road of industrial rejuvenation and scientific and technological innovation, and uses scientific and technological innovation to promote the transformation and development of the real economy.
Let students in poor areas enjoy the same educational resources in developed areas; the pure natural agricultural products "hidden" in the mountains are monitored and traced through technical means and sent to the tables of urban people to increase the income of farmers; in the unmanned workshops built in factories, electronic products that can add color to our lives are intelligently manufactured...
As shown in the opening video, this is not only Lenovo's insistence on the pursuit of "scientific and technological innovation, hard work and rejuvenation", but also Lenovo's adherence to the original intention of "building a smart China".
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