Lenovo CEO hands $3.25m of bonus to staff

10,000 staff get windfall as Yang Yuanqing shares the wealth for second year running

Lenovo's chief executive has taken the unusual step of giving most of his bonus to rank-and-file staff following record annual results.

Yang Yuanqing is sharing $3.25m (£2.09m) of his $4.23m annual bonus with about 10,000 of the newly crowned PC market leader's employees, according to a Bloomberg report.

About 85 per cent of the recipients are in Lenovo's native China, where monthly wages are similar to the average $325 payment handed out by the vendor. A representative confirmed that UK staff are among the beneficiaries.

It's the second year running Yang has shared the wealth – last year he handed out $3m to his staff.

Although an unusual step, it is not without precedent: although under very different circumstances, in 2011 Acer chief executive JT Wang voluntarily forwent his entire salary and bonus after the vendor announced it was taking a $150m hit over inventory mismanagement.

Closer to home, Northamber chairman David Phillips opted to take less than a tenth of his annual wage in the distributor's last fiscal year, which enabled it to post a small profit.

To put Yang's generosity in context, the Lenovo top dog was paid a total of $14.6m last year, including his bonus and long-term incentive awards of $8.94m.

While the wider PC market is in freefall, Lenovo saw pre-tax profits and sales jump by 16 and 10 per cent respectively last year and was recently unanimously crowned as the PC market leader by both Gartner and IDC for the first time.

In a memo to workers, Gina Qiao, senior vice president of human resources at Lenovo, said: "[Yang] believes that he has the responsibility as an owner of the company, and the opportunity as our leader, to ensure all of our employees understand the impact they have on building Lenovo."