Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; that's the problem.
So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters.
How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?
The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph.
The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz.
The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.
Lenovo isn't even an American company. Wikipedia lists their global headquarters as in Beijing.