Lenovo has retrenched some staff within its Australian operations, which included channel sales director, Ian Hume.
Hume joined Lenovo in April last year and was responsible for its channel network across A/NZ. National sales manager, Fred Viet, will now take over the channel business.
ARN also understands that the product marketing team for Workstation and Server were also retrenched along with several sales executives, but some were then re-hired as contractors, according to a source. The vendor would not put a figure on how many staff were impacted by the retrenchments.
Lenovo A/NZ managing director, Matt Codrington, confirmed Hume was retrenched and said it didn’t have any plans for global large scale staff reductions as it accelerates its transformation to a PC-plus company.
“We regularly review our operation and organisation, adjust and optimise staffing levels to align with our strategies,” Codrington told ARN. “It’s an ongoing exercise to optimise the business, as we change and drive better efficiency within the company. Some roles will evolve and adapt, but that’s not necessarily the indicator of the intent of the business for specific roles.
“We will continue to invest our resources in high growth areas while managing efficiently as we work to drive balanced, profitable growth and strengthen our competitiveness in the PC plus era.”
Codrington said Lenovo was still focused on maintaining its presence in the workstation market and expanding it.
“Our core business is still around PC, laptop and desktop, but our ambition and direction is to transform and include the wider range of smart connected devices, which includes tablets, smartphones and a broad range of enterprise products,” he said.
