Lenovo to subcontract Taiwanese makers to assemble NBs

The mainland China-based Lenovo Group, the world's fourth-largest manufacturer of notebook computers, will carry out a drastic change to its business strategy by commissioning contract manufacturers to handle entire NB making, including assembly.

In the past, the Lenovo Group entrusted some Taiwanese contract manufacturers to make NBs, which was then shipped back to the group for final assembly and packaging before shipment. The change in Lenovo's business strategy is expected to benefit such Taiwanese contract manufacturers as Quanta Computer Inc., Compal Electronics Corp., Wistron Corp. and Tegatron Holding Ltd.

To fully take advantage of economy of scale, Lenovo will subcontract only three, rather than the four in the past, makers to produce NBs.

In the beginning of this year, Lenovo repositioned it's the "IdeaPad" line as consumer-type NBs and "ThinkPad" as business-application NBs.

At present, Lenovo commissions only Wistron to contract manufacture the "ThinkPad" line of business NBs. Recently, Lenovo reportedly has plans to increase the number of contract manufacturers, with the most likely candidates being Quanta and Compal for their relatively large capacities.

Lenovo currently attributes 90% of its total shipments to the "ThinkPad"-series. At the end of last year, the group announced that it had mapped out an ambitious plan to expand the sales of the "IdeaPad" consumer-type NBs.

Because of the increase in the production of the consumer-type NBs, Lenovo said it would see shipments of such products double year-on-year in 2008 with shipments growing from 400,000 units to one million units.

According to statistics compiled by the industry analysts-International Data Corp. and Gartner Corp., Lenovo was the world's fourth-largest manufacturer of NBs with a global market share of between 7.5% and 7.7%. IDC anticipated global shipments of personal computers would reach 302 million units this year, of which 138 million units would be NBs with the remaining 164 million being desktop PCs.

source & copyright: CENS