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| Customers talk with sales staff at a Lenovo
outlet in Shanghai. (newsphoto) |
Lenovo Group Ltd won clearance from a US national security oversight
committee to acquire IBM's personal computer business, the companies said
yesterday, overcoming resistance from some US lawmakers.
An IBM executive said the high-level US committee
had given the deal its unanimous
consent the final external approval needed putting the
US$1.25 billion PC sale on track to close in the second quarter as
originally planned.
"We were able to get unanimous agreement from the members of the
committee," Stephen Ward, general manager of IBM's Personal Systems
Division, said in a telephone interview. Ward is to become chief executive
of Lenovo, which is headquartered in Beijing, once the deal closes.
The merger of the IBM PC business with China's biggest PC maker the
first combination ever of a major US corporation and a top Chinese one
will create the world's third largest PC maker and one strongly positioned
in several fast-growing markets.
The deal met unexpected resistance when some US lawmakers began
decrying the loss of a US-based PC maker to China on national security
accounts.
The go-ahead from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United
States (CFIUS) was received on Tuesday, Ward said.
CFIUS is composed of 11 US agencies and was created in 1998 to conduct
security reviews of business deals.
Ward said terms of the approval are confidential , but that no
compromises were required over the location of Lenovo facilities in
sensitive research areas, nor were limits put on Lenovo's ability to sell
PCs to US agencies.
"I don't think we made any compromises at all," Ward said.
(China Daily) | 
Updated: 2005-03-10 10:34