The Laptop Supply Chain

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When a U.S. consumer orders a laptop from HP or other big sellers, how does the machine get made? Often via a complex supply chain in Taiwan and China, shaped by rocky cross-Strait relations, according to the Wall Street Journal: 'Outsourcing to low-cost, high-quality Taiwanese manufacturers has helped make Dell and H-P the world's top two PC companies in terms of sales...But the relationship between U.S. computer firms and their third-party manufacturers can be tricky. In the struggle to retain an element of control over their suppliers, H-P, Dell and others play contract manufacturers against each other to keep prices falling and ensure no supplier gains too much leverage.'"

Comments

Who knew?

[MarkGriz]

"... shaped by rocky cross-Strait relations"

Who knew that laptop technology was influenced so much by country music. And, why is he so cross anyhow?

Re:Build

[ID000001]

There are barebone notebook with just the case and motherboard these day (Many avaialble at www.newegg.com for instant) and let you have some flexiablity in setting up a notebook yourself as far as component goes. Brand like Acer, ECS are very popular.
Still much more limiting then a desktop PC, but it is a far cry from a few years ago where you can only have one model of video card and one properity casing CD-Rom drive you can upgrade to a writer for $200.

That's great!

[dextroz]

In a few years, no one on continental America will know how to put a laptop together :-/ But they'll be great at tracking DHL/AirBorne and of course flipping burgers ;-)

Interesting...

[lucabrasi999]

From TFA:

Outsourcing to low-cost, high-quality Taiwanese manufacturers has helped make Dell and H-P the world's top two PC companies in terms of sales. International Business Machines Corp., which outsourced less than half of its laptop production, according to Merrill Lynch, and operated its own factory in China, consistently lost money on its PCs. It sold the business this year to China's Lenovo Group Ltd., which has used Taiwanese companies to make most of its notebooks in China.

So, IBM used to keep most of it's own laptop production in-house. Which may partially explain why the ThinkPad's are, by far, the best laptops around. Let's see what happens to the ThinkPad now that Lenovo runs the show.

Taiwan: Laptops are just the tip...

[Nova Express]

...of Taiwan's importance to the Gloval High tech economy. Even more important are the roles of Taiwan semiconductor foundry houses like TSMC and UMC. Taiwan dominates the foundry business (IBM and Singapore's Chartered have significantly lower volumes), and with more and more chip design firms going fabless, an ever-greater percentage of cutting-edge chip designs flow through Taiwan. Indeed, it would be hard to find a computer or MP3 player sold today which didn't have a part fabbed in Taiwan.

Now, imagine what would happen to America's high tech industry if Communist China invaded...