APAC PC shipments swelled in 2007, according to IDC

Many notebook PC brands have now outsourced 100 percent of their core notebook PC barebones assembly to subcontract manufacturers

Display market research firm DisplaySearch has found that 89 percent of the 29 million notebook PCs shipped in third quarter of 2007 were made by Taiwanese OEMs. This sets a new record high, up from 85 percent in the second quarter of 2007 and 80 percent in the first quarter of the year.

Many notebook PC brands outsourced 100 percent of their core notebook PC barebones assembly to subcontract manufacturers, including HP, Dell, Apple and Acer Gateway. Some brands such as Toshiba, Sony and Fujitsu insist on maintaining some in-house assembly.

Among Taiwanese OEMs, Quanta is the leading manufacturer with a 34 percent market share on a unit basis, followed by 24 percent at Compal, and 13 percent at Wistron. LCD panels are consigned by notebook PC brands and then shipped to the OEM for assembly. HP is the top notebook LCD panel customer for Samsung, LPL and AUO.

Highlights of the Q3 ’07 Quarterly Notebook PC Value Chain Report include:

• 31.9 million notebook LCD modules were shipped from TFT LCD makers, while notebook PC manufacturers shipped 29 million units. These variances were mainly due to supply chain, assembly lead time, buffer stocks and channel inventory.

• As shown in Table 1, Quanta led the Notebook PC subcontract manufacturing market with a 34 percent share in Q3’07, followed by Compal, Wistron, Inventec and ASUSTeK.

• The main customers for Quanta are HP, Dell, Acer and Apple, and the main customers for Compal are Dell, HP, Toshiba and Acer. The main customers of Inventec are HP and Toshiba. HP, Acer and Lenovo are the main customers of Wistron. And the main OEM customers of ASUSTeK are Toshiba and Dell.

In Q3’07, HP was the top customer of LG.Philips LCD, Samsung and AUO. Sony, Toshiba and Lenovo are the main customers of TMDisplay. Sony and Dell were the two major notebook LCD customers of CPT.

In addition, each of the top five suppliers looked to their top five customers for at least 50 percent of their volume, with the exception of CMO.