Lenovo CEO Gives $3M Bonus To Factory Workers. Faith in Humanity: Restored

Lenovo, if you haven't heard, has been having a great year. In late March, the company announced that it had secured the #2 spot in worldwide PC sales, leaping up the charts to land just below HP. This achievement netted the company's CEO, Yang Yuanqing, a nifty $3 million bonus. Rather than pocketing the cash for himself, Yang decided to share it with Lenovo's lower-tier employees in the company's call centers, and production lines.

The report from China indicates that the a third of Leonovo's workers, or about 8500 people, earned a bonus of $314. While that's not a lot by US standards, it's a bit less than a full month's wages for Chinese worker in manufacturing. The math also works out -- $314 given to ~8600 people is a total of $2.64M, which makes sense once you consider the impact of various taxes.


It's a great move from Yang, and one we wish more US CEOs would emulate. Real wages in this country have stagnated while executive pay has skyrocketed -- the six heirs to the Walmart empire have a net worth of $89 billion. The bottom 41.5% of US households (a total of some 48.8 million people) also have a net worth of ~$90 billion. Despite such trends, we rather doubt any US CEO's will be following suit any time soon.

Of course, this is likely at least partly a calculated move to earn the company strong PR, but we doubt that matters to the several thousand workers who now have a greater amount of disposable income. Lenovo's published slides indicate that the company plans to hold on to what it's claimed, with a mixed strategy of attacking in domestic market (where it can leverage its own Chinese production to compete on price) while defending share gained in Europe and America.