Lenovo rolls out new products at tech event in U.S.

Lenovo Group Ltd., a Chinese information technology (IT) company, rolled out a number of new products and shared its vision for the future of the information industry on Thursday at an annual event in San Francisco.

Lenovo Tech World 2016, Lenovo's first annual event held closer to the Silicon Valley in Northern California on the U.S. west coast, demonstrated several concept devices, including ones with flexible screens, connected smart shoes, and virtual reality (VR) goggles.

Lenovo sees device innovation, device plus cloud connectivity and infrastructure as "three pillars of future technology," said Yang Yuanqing, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the multinational company.

"While Lenovo has a strong heritage of device innovation, the rapidly changing landscape means entirely new concepts and categories in cloud and connectivity are emerging," Yang said in his keynote speech at the one-day event.

These devices are as mobile and flexible in design as what their users require with respect to a higher level of seamless connectivity, he said at the event, which attracted more than 1,300 attendees including business partners, industry watchers and media representatives.

As the world's largest personal computer (PC) vendor by unit sales in 2015, Lenovo invited computer chip maker Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich, network software company Juniper Networks' chief technology officer (CTO) Pradeep Sindhu, and tech leaders from Google to speak at the conference.

Krzanich showcased latest experiences in gaming, sports and the cloud made possible by Lenovo PCs using Intel technology.

However, big hits on the stage were a number of mobile devices, including the world's first smartphone powered by Tango technology, which was developed by Google to sense and map the surroundings of the user with a set of sensors and software, making a host of augmented reality (AR) experiences possible.

Augmented, or supplemented, by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or global positioning system (GPS) data, AR offers a live direct or indirect view of a physical environment. It has been one of the fastest growing areas in recent years.

Calling the Tango-enabled smartphone, known as Lenovo PHAB2 Pro, "a flagship device," Lenovo said it would be available in the United States later this year.

In addition, Lenovo announced a new Moto family of smartphones. It acquired Motorola Mobility in 2014 from Google reportedly with 660 million U.S. dollars in cash and 750 million dollars in Lenovo stocks.

At a CEO roundtable late Thursday, Yang said Lenovo's smartphone business was down 48 percent worldwide in 2015, mainly due to a reduction of about 80 percent in sales on the China market. He saw it as a chance to reset the company's phone business and move to a profitable growth with mid-range and high-end devices, the process of which "will need two years."

Apparently in reference to the decreasing volume of the global PC market and Lenovo's 3 percent drop in revenue and 128 million dollars net loss in the latest fiscal year ending March 31 this year, Yang said his priorities are to "protect PC business, regain growth and turn around."

Founded in the 1980s and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKSE) since 1994, the global Fortune 500 company reported 44.9 billion dollars in annual revenues on the 2015/2016 balance sheet.

"The power of connectivity is transforming the PC from personal computing to CC - connected computing," said Yang.

"We're helping lead this transformation by combining our expertise in hardware innovation with the critical backend cloud platform to help devices listen, see, sense and understand the world," he added. Endi