Lenovo brings its ‘Start up with Lenovo’ to Karnataka

Lenovo has announced the launch of its ‘Start up with Lenovo’ initiative to increase PC usage in Karnataka. This is part of the ongoing initiative by Lenovo to jumpstart India’s computer penetration, which is currently at 10% and is the lowest among developing countries like South Africa (18%), Turkey (49%) and Malaysia (64%). This program is a significant step by Lenovo tying in into the ‘Digital India’ program of the current Government that aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society.

Through ‘Start up with Lenovo’ campaign’s successful pilot phase in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Gujarat, Punjab and Maharashtra, Lenovo is now widening this initiative to benefit and empower the youth in tier-2 markets across India. Even though Bangalore is the silicon valley of India, Karnataka only has 13% computer penetration which is even lower than states likes Kerala (16%) and Chandigarh (33%). This offers a huge opportunity to increase the computer penetration in the state owing to its large youth population. This initiative is primarily aimed to bridge the urban-rural digital divide in the state and to empower and educate the youth on the benefits of technology adoption. Lenovo is also providing an end-to-end package to make computers more accessible and affordable to the youth across the market. This includes an attractive finance scheme, PC accessories and huge-scale promotion to drive awareness.

Speaking about the initiative, Bhaskar Choudhuri, Director Marketing, Lenovo India said, “As the global PC leader, we want to address the problem of computer penetration and adoption in India. Lenovo, through its continuous India-centric research and insight mining, has managed to effectively identify the key barriers of PC adoption and is all set towards sparking change. The program has already shown significant success in Andhra Pradesh & Gujarat and we want to extend this to the rest of the country including Karnataka, which is an important state for us. This will be a continued, long term initiative from Lenovo that addresses the youth and is geared towards complementing the states’ focus on education, owing to the high student population.

Dinesh Nair, Sub-Regional General Manager West & South India, Lenovo India further added, “We understood the consumers’ key barriers towards computer adoption and designed a campaign to address the same. Lenovo is looking at a comprehensive 360 degree outreach that includes student engagement through college activation and advertising. There were fragmented initiatives earlier, however with this campaign we want to address the multi-sectoral challenges and focus on increasing PC penetration in the state.”

Program details:

The main bottlenecks affecting computer penetration in India are the lack of awareness of PC usage, as well as the availability and affordability of PCs.  Through this program, Lenovo is aiming at educating the youth about the importance and benefits of PC’s as well as providing the financial support to purchase one.

• Lenovo is offering financing support on a wide range of fully loaded, great value computers across AIOs and laptops starting at INR 24,990 with interest free EMIs as low as INR 3000
• For the finance scheme, Lenovo has tied up with Bajaj Fin Serv to offer customers a 9 EMI scheme, divided into a down payment of 2 months EMI, a processing fee of INR 749; and payback balance in 7 EMIs with 0% interest on EMIs
• Lenovo has tied up with Tata Docomo for easy internet access by providing free dongles
• Lenovo has also signed an MoU with IIT-Bombay Entrepreneurship cell and will be engaging with local home-grown start-up heroes as well as launch college activations and outreach programs to spread the message.