If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much are graphics worth? In a series of slides, Lenovo executives on Wednesday evening sought to explain and justify its $2.9 billion purchase of Google’s Motorola Mobility phone business. In one slide they called this a “Great Leap.”

Sometimes, graphics can tell a story best.

In a week, the company has spent a whopping $5 billion. Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing is all in, betting the future on this deal and last week’s $2.3 billion server acquisition with IBM.

He’s adding more than 10,000 employees, operations around the world, and some $10 billion in revenues. Both both acquisitions involve troubled businesses. 

So why do Google?

Here’s a look at five slides from that presentation.

These graphics point out:

1. Why Lenovo is targeting smartphones as part of its overall growth strategy as a company. The smartphone market is exploding worldwide.

2. How the deal boosts Lenovo’s global market share – including a beachhead in North America where it currently has no presence and more than 8 percent in fast-growing Latin America.

3. Just as Lenovo capitalized on the “Think” brand when it acquired IBM’s personal computer business in 2005, the company is proud of Motorola’s heritage.

4. The combination of Lenovo and Motorola Mobility will create a “premier global smartphone player,” Lenovo believes.

5. Finally, Lenovo says the deal fits in well with its “Protect and Attack” strategy.

Yang embraced the “Protect and Attack” strategy a couple of years back:

Protect the home base of China where it rules the PC business and is a growing smartphone force

And “attack” in other markets as well as other kinds of devices.

The newer “PC Plus” strategy is an augmentation to the “Protect and Defend” strategy.

Even as Lenovo was headed toward becoming the world’s No. 1 PC seller over the past two years, Yang and Lenovo’s leadership saw tha smartphones as well as tablets were eating into PC sales.

The world was going mobile (thank you, Apple iPhones and iPads; Samsung Galaxies) – and Lenovo pivoted. It embraced smartphones in 2010 and added all kinds of tablets, such as the remarkable Yoga. Smart TVs are on the product list, too.

Yang set a goal of 40 million smartphone sales in 2013. Lenovo sold 45 million and is now No. 5 in global sales, says IDC.

The Motorola deal will up that share and also bring Lenovo into the U.S. as well as Latin America markets for the first time.

Yang is quite proud of the fact that the pivot has made Lenovo third in a new statistical category: Mobile Internet connected devices.

Some people may cringe at the “Great Leap” remark. “A Great Leap toward …” sounds like a “Great Leap Forward.” That’s a slogan forever linked to China’s Communist Party. And the global media insists on calling Lenovo a “Chinese” company even though it operates the global executive headquarters in Morrisville and has employees spread around 60 countries – with more to come.

Will the Motorola Mobility and IBM deals pay off?

Few people gave Lenovo a chance with the IBM PC deal in 2005 that was in many ways smaller than these two new bets Yang is making. But the record of the man called China’s Bill Gates deserves respect.

In these slides, he spells out in many ways why he is taking a great leap – either into the abyss or into a sea of growing revenues and business.

[LENOVO ARCHIVE: Check out eight years of Lenovo stories as reported in WRALTechWire.]