How globalization puts the pieces together
6/10/2005 06:37:00 PM, posted by anandThe Wall Street Journey has an article titled The Laptop Trail that shows how a laptop is made and shipped, when you order it online.
When a customer in the U.S. clicks on Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Web site to purchase one of its Pavilion zd8000 laptop computers, the order quickly arrives thousands of miles away at a factory in China run by a less-familiar name, Quanta Computer Inc.
Although virtually unknown to consumers, Quanta is the world's biggest maker of laptops. As part of a sometimes-difficult symbiosis, the Taiwanese company makes roughly one-quarter of the world's portable computers, which are then sold by brands such as H-P and Dell Inc. Quanta collects components from countries around the world and assembles them at its Quanta Shanghai Manufacture City complex.
Quanta made nearly a quarter of the roughly 49 million notebooks shipped last year -- a share the company expects to grow to a third this year. Including smaller rivals like Compal Electronics Inc., Inventec Corp. and Wistron Corp., Taiwanese concerns now produce as much as 80% of the world's laptops.
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