Lenovo doubles down on its partner sustainability focus at its 2025 Lenovo 360 Circle Summit

At its second partner-centric in-person event, Lenovo reaffirmed its community-focused approach to supporting the channel with its sustainability goals. 2025’s Summit underscored its focus on certified refurbished devices and set out the next steps for Lenovo’s partner updates from a sustainability perspective.

As sustainability has risen to the channel’s agenda during the 2020s, vendors, especially OEMs, have responded by embedding sustainability within their partner programs. Despite macroeconomic and political headwinds affecting sustainability and ESG, Lenovo recently reaffirmed its commitment to partners by hosting its second Lenovo 360 Circle Summit. The event, hosted in Geneva, has grown substantially in scope since the inaugural 2024 Summit, now with 180 participants from channel sustainability leads globally.

Lenovo 360 Circle continues to grow, even well beyond Europe

Since the launch of the Lenovo 360 Circle in 2021, Lenovo has committed to a different approach to sustainability-focused partner programs. The core brand of the initiative has centred on building a community of Lenovo partners with shared sustainability goals, challenges and values. Interactivity between partners is the key differentiator between rival partner programs, notably HP Amplify Impact, which launched first and has since become more integrated into the core Amplify program. In turn, the Circle also serves as a means for Lenovo to engage with and learn from its partners.

Regular and ongoing Lenovo-led virtual focus groups have been core to this community-driven approach, connecting resellers, distributors, MSPs and systems integrators in discussions on shared challenges, namely growing circular IT, navigating product sustainability data complexity, tackling Scope 3 emissions, and driving equitable social and cultural change in the industry. Beyond this, the program also features sustainability training resources for partners’ salespeople and sustainability leads, as well as certifications and partner awards, which are also cornerstones of the sustainability programs of competing PC and infrastructure vendors, notably Dell.

The community-oriented, collaborative approach to decarbonization poses mutual benefits for Lenovo and the channel – 98% of Lenovo’s total emissions are Scope 3 and the majority of this is downstream, with partners playing a key role in supporting customers with procuring the most sustainable products and services. Decarbonizing its channel is a priority for Lenovo, underscored by its initiative to baseline the emissions of Lenovo 360 Circle partners in 2024; enabling a transition to circular procurement is core to this decarbonization.

Over the years, Lenovo’s community has grown in scale, currently including over 580 individual Lenovo partners. The Lenovo 360 Circle spans 52 countries and its increasingly global scope was reflected in its 2025 Summit, with increased representation from APAC, LATAM, and North America as partner sustainability efforts grow well beyond Europe, often assumed to be the leading region in this aspect.

As the Circle expands, its 2025 Summit saw the launch of its Executive Advisory Board, which serves as a strategic sounding board for the future of Lenovo’s community-led approach. Distribution giant TD SYNNEX, alongside Channel Titans CDW and Dustin, sit on the board to shape the direction of the Circle and ensure the approach remains relevant to the channel’s evolving approach to ESG.

The in-person format for a partner-focused, vendor-hosted sustainability event is yet to be replicated by rivals, at least at this scale. Vendors’ global partner events inherently require air travel across regions, posing a difficult conundrum from an environmental perspective. However, as the IT sector’s emissions grow above those of the aviation sector, the need for outcome-oriented sustainability events is especially palpable.

Certified Refurbished takes the center stage as vendors race toward circular opportunities

Despite the challenges facing sustainability in IT, one standout area of resilience continues to be circular IT, especially the refurbished market. The results of Canalys’ (now part of Omdia) upcoming Global Sustainable Ecosystems Survey reveal that well over a third of partners are seeing growth in demand for refurbished hardware over the last year, while the majority see demand as consistent with 2024. In tandem with the refurbished market’s growth, vendors are doubling down on their refurbished portfolios, with Lenovo’s Certified Refurbished offering getting the spotlight at the Lenovo 360 Circle Summit.

Since launching its Certified Refurbished brand for PCs and servers in spring 2024, Lenovo is working to grow its refurbished business, which comprises of used devices that have been restored to high functional and cosmetic standards, data wiped and resold with standard warranty. Its Certified Refurbished brand now covers 12 markets globally and is set to expand. This will also include a Certified Refurbished services element that allows enterprise customers to extend the lifespan of their existing devices through refurbishment, accompanied by an extra warranty. In the near future, Lenovo has committed to expanding the volume of Certified Refurbished devices sold through the channel and it is actively exploring ways to work with partners that have their own in-house refurbishment capabilities.

Many hardware vendors have a growing opportunity to collaborate more deeply with the Channel Titans, who has invested in their own professional refurbishment centers. As the likes of Advania, Ingram Micro, Foxway and 3stepIT continue to grow the scale of their device refurbishing operations, vendors are recognizing that channel partnerships will be crucial to expanding their refurbished market share.

Competitor HP has notably embraced this trend in recent months with its Certified Refurbished Licensing Program; this allows partners such as Flex IT Distribution and SCC to refurbish HP devices internally and resell them under the HP Certified Refurbished brand. Vendors are set to continue exploring this model as they recognize and legitimize the ability of their longstanding channel partners to expand the reach of OEM-approved refurbished IT.

Commitments of expanded resources to support partners

As the channel further advances its approach to sustainability, partners’ needs are evolving. The priority for many sustainability-oriented customers is now commercializing sustainability in a way that drives provable decarbonization, both internally and for customers. Moreover, in the AI era, energy efficiency is crucial to minimizing the ever-growing resource intensity of computing and partners are expecting leadership from vendors on responsible AI.

The Lenovo 360 Circle Summit featured a few key announcements of next steps for the program:

• A new Sustainability Sales Kit: building on the existing Lenovo 360 Sustainability Learning Paths, Lenovo announced a Sustainability Sales Certification to upskill sellers and dedicated webinars with external sustainability sales expertise. The Sales Certification covers Lenovo's corporate and value chain sustainability approach, as well as the sustainability credentials of the vendor’s product and service portfolio. The announcement follows a recent update to Lenovo’s Partner Hub with new resources to help channel sellers meet customer requirements around sustainability and related metrics.

• Advanced learning and development programs: Lenovo will expand its educational resources with new Master Classes and Bootcamps, covering key partner sustainability priorities like AI’s environmental impact and circularity.

• Incentivization: by 2026, Lenovo has committed to adding an incentivization program to the Lenovo 360 Circle, although specifics are yet to be revealed. The results of the annual Canalys (now part of Omdia) Sustainable Ecosystems Surveys regularly reveal that partners’ top expectations of vendors on sustainability are the provision of financial incentives to support asset takeback and resale of refurbished hardware.

• An Allyship Program: the Lenovo 360 Circle has successfully connected partners with their competitors, unifying them on the grounds of shared sustainability priorities and challenges. Although vendors such as Intel, Schneider Electric and Microsoft have engaged with or sponsored the Lenovo 360 Circle, vendor engagement with the framework has been comparatively limited; the newly announced Allyship Program could be an opportunity to enable much-needed vendor collaboration.

Opportunities and challenges ahead for vendors supporting partners with sustainability

Although the notion of corporate sustainability and ESG themselves have become controversial among investors, policymakers and corporate board members, the momentum continues as the channel remains firmly committed to its sustainability ambitions.

The circular opportunity is the most obvious area where partners can make a tangible difference to enable decarbonization. In 2025, the core challenge in scaling this is not one of demand, but of reinventing longstanding go-to-market motions. When it comes to circular IT growth, vendors are competing with themselves. Despite recent efforts to build trust and consistency in their refurbished portfolios, their investors and commercial teams still expect safe, predictable revenue from regular new hardware refresh cycles. The perennial focus on new sales points to a wider business model issue that risks undermining the efforts of vendors’ dedicated sustainability teams – Lenovo has acknowledged this issue head-on, citing genuine executive buy-in for the company’s refurbished strategy and its goal to be the #1 refurbishment vendor.

As partners reflect on the outcomes of Lenovo’s Geneva event, the industry’s success as it approaches its 2030 goals will be determined by its ability to find balance in seemingly opposing forces. Circular IT growth is subject to vendors’ ability to downplay their focus on new products and the effectiveness of improvements to the energy efficiency of IT infrastructure is subject to the wider emissions increase from data center and AI expansion. These challenges are the ones that will shape the next five years and the vendor community can either lead or lag behind when addressing this complexity.