Lenovo's Motorola buy seen boosting its global expansion

[BEIJING] In 1984, with only US$25,000 in Chinese government funding and a dusty 20 square metre bungalow as their headquarters, a small group of scientists in Beijing founded a firm called New Technology Developer Inc.

Thirty years later, the company - which went on to become Legend and later, Lenovo - is the world's biggest personal computer maker, and has just completed two major deals with IBM and Google that analysts say will help it to diversify away from the sagging PC market and boost its expansion overseas.

Lenovo's US$2.3 billion purchase of IBM's low-end server business and its US$2.91 billion acquisition of Motorola from Google are evidence of the tech giant's "global ambitions", said Jean-Francois Dufour at DCA Chine-Analyse.