At 71, Lenovo's Liu Chuanzhi is still a legend in the world of Chinese business

Chinese media still refer adoringly to Liu Chuanzhi as the "godfather of Lenovo", the computer technology company he founded three decades ago that still ranks as one of the biggest success stories to emerge from the nation.

Lenovo snapped up IBM's personal computing business in 2005 and showed the world it meant business by ranking as the world's No. 1 vendor of PCs last year.

Liu, the 71-year-old chairman and executive director of Legend Holdings, Lenovo's parent company, must have felt at least a faint flicker of pride.

With Legend's listing on Hong Kong's main bourse today, the natural-born entrepreneur is going from strength to strength, and refusing to rest on his laurels despite all the accolades he has amassed over a long and storied career.

Although he was born in Shanghai, Liu founded Lenovo in Beijing in 1984 - at the time, it was known as Legend Computers - with several of his fellow scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the leading think-tank for scientific endeavours on the mainland.

It was renamed as Lenovo is 2003 amid a media blitz and large-scale branding campaign. The word is a portmanteau of the first two letters of the parent company's name and the Latin ablative for "new".

The turning point came a decade ago with the acquisition of IBM's PC business, a landmark deal many analysts hail as a turning point for China's technology industry.