Lenovo Enhances Supply Chain Security and Sustainability

Lenovo has once again been ranked in the Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2024, ranking tenth in this list of global companies with exceptional supply chains. The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 is a renowned annual ranking of the world’s superior supply chains. From financial and corporate social responsibility data and community opinion, the Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2024 report, celebrates and profiles companies demonstrating excellence in supply chain management. 

Over the last 12 months, Lenovo has intensified its focus on key areas in its supply chain, including security, digital transformation, and environmental sustainability, alongside the company’s global/local approach to drive greater efficiencies and improved customer outcomes. 

Today, Lenovo’s global hybrid manufacturing network includes 30+ manufacturing sites spanning 10 markets in the 180 markets Lenovo does business in, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Mexico, and the US. This ensures the supply chain remains resilient and can adapt to any disruption.

Lenovo’s supply chain is one of the clearest examples of its global/local strategy and delivers not only operational efficiencies for the business but a definitive advantage to customers through a focus on manufacturing in Europe for Europe, the Americas for the Americas, and Asia for Asia. Bringing manufacturing closer to customers shortens the local supply chain, utilizes the local skilled labor force, and supports Lenovo's sustainability goals through more sustainable manufacturing methods. Building devices close to customers dramatically reduce the freight miles these products incur, providing more efficient and sustainable transportation options. As an example, since becoming operational in 2022, Lenovo’s European manufacturing facility in Hungary has shipped over 1.5 million workstations and servers to over 2,500 customers in 70 markets across EMEA.

Che Min (Jammi) Tu, Senior Vice President and Group Operations Officer, Lenovo, said, “Our supply chain has always been a towering strength for Lenovo and remains fundamental to our future success. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the topic of supply chains make headlines around the world when the flow of goods is impacted and the knock-on effect this has on a business and its reputation. What’s clearer than ever today is that a company’s supply chain is a competitive advantage and can no longer be considered a cost center. In fact, at Lenovo, we’ve successfully transitioned our global supply chain into a commercial center and profit pool. We are also pioneering Manufacturing as a Service, as well as developing and incubating new technologies and solutions within our manufacturing facilities and logistics services that we can offer our customers. For us, we’re incredibly proud that we continue to be recognized as having one of the most exceptional supply chains in the world across all industries.”

Lenovo Securing Supply Chains

Lenovo's commitment to delivering innovation, efficiency, and resilience to customers worldwide is underpinned by its resilient supply chain, ensuring cutting-edge products reach customers securely.

Lenovo's supply chain security approach is built on a foundation of prevention. Suppliers and components are vigorously vetted, with the company’s security-by-design approach embedded into the product lifecycle. By taking a proactive stance against backdoors, tainted products, counterfeits, and hardware/software vulnerabilities, Lenovo safeguards its products and sets a high industry standard for supply chain security.

Doug Fisher, SVP and Chief Security Officer, Lenovo, said “Lenovo is dedicated to driving supply chain security through leadership, so we remain in front of the supply chain evolution. Our goal is to ensure our products are safe, highly resilient, and trustworthy before entering our customers’ environment. We attest to the integrity of each device right down to the lowest levels in the system.”

Lenovo also remains committed to ESG. It was in the first group of companies and the first PC and smartphone maker to have targets validated in alignment to Science Based Targets initiative’s Net-Zero Standard.. It continues to focus on future-proofing its operations by making the supply chain more robust, adaptable, and profitable and recently released Lenovo ESG Navigator, a digital solution for collecting and measuring ESG data points – like energy use - from factory sites in real time

With the development of an AI-powered ESG assessment system such as Lenovo’s Intelligence Sustainability Solutions Advisor (LISSA), Lenovo is empowering customers with actionable sustainability insights from across the global supply chain to understand the estimated emissions impact across their IT lifecycle and make critical decisions to decrease emissions. Initially developed to support supply chain decision-making, LISSA has now been commercially deployed to support customers’ IT sustainability goals.

As part of Lenovo’s drive towards the circular economy, utilizing the supply chain for customers’ aftersales support, where possible, returned components are repaired by engineers, quality-tested, and reused. To date, 4m+ components, including motherboards, processors, drives, memory, and more, have been diverted from landfills for reuse within the product lifecycle.