Yang catapults Lenovo into Fortune 500

Hong Kong: Rock star, hard-driving salesman and card-carrying Communist party member.

Lenovo Chairman Yang Yuanqing is the key driver of the No 4 personal computer maker's growth that has seen it enter the Fortune 500 for the first time this year.

Yang hopes Lenovo can ride the Olympic bandwagon into a bigger US and European consumer business, barely three years after rocketing onto the world stage with the $1.25 billion purchase of IBM's PC unit.

Yang's timing could have been better. Lenovo, which failed to see through a second acquisition attempt abroad last year, faces decelerating growth this year in both its foreign and home markets.

It lost the No 3 rank to Acer in 2007 after the aggressive Taiwanese company beat it in a race for Eur-ope's Packard Bell.

"Lenovo has just come to the forefront of the global stage. We still have a long way to go to become as strong as those companies that are on the Fortune 500, year after year," Yang told investors on Thursday.

Lenovo's grip is indeed precarious: it only barely squeezed its way onto Fortune magazine's list of the world's largest companies this year, ranking 499th.

Yang, 43, is one of a growing band of card-carrying Communist party members who have turned moribund state enterprises into viable publicly listed corporations.

After joining Lenovo in 1989, he was put in charge of the PC unit, known as Legend at the time, as a so-called "young marshal" to founder Liu Chuanzhi. While Liu served as a father figure to the company, Yang's job was to help Lenovo go out and conquer - be it customers, corporate partners or acquisitions.

"He's chairman of the board but he's got a very good pulse of the rhythm of the business. He's not just a strategic thinker but he also understands execution," Deepak Advani, Lenovo chief marketing officer, told Reuters in a recent interview.

"In the company, he's very much viewed as a rock star."

An aggressive salesman, Yang once led his team to a crossroad and, on the count of three, made them walk in four different directions until they came across a computer store, where they had to pitch Lenovo products.

But all of this may pale in comparison to Olympic glory. As one of the Olympic torch bearers, Yang ran his part in Tiananmen square in Beijing last week.

And as one of several Olympic Partners, Lenovo designed the Olympic torch and carted out 30,000 pieces of PC gear for use at Olympic venues.

"Despite being short, it was one of the most wonderful journeys of my life," Yang told local media.