A recent Forbes article “Made in Taiwan” is worth a read. The article is about the Taiwan’s king of laptops, Barry Lam the billionaire founder and chairman of Taiwan’s Quanta Computer.
Regular readers of these pages will remember that Quanta has made the last few PowerBooks for Apple including Lombard, Pismo and the new PowerBook G4, a.k.a. Mercury. Alpha Top, another Taiwanese manufacturer, makes iBooks for Apple.
According to the article Quanta should ship 4 million notebooks this year “one seventh of all those sold on earth and up 50% from last year. Quanta makes more notebooks than anyone else, but you’ve probably never heard of it. You do know its customers: Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Apple, HP, IBM, Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, Siemens.”
Last year, Compaq, Dell and IBM all outsourced at least 65% of their notebook needs to Taiwan.
One particularly interesting part of the article is Lam’s assertion about how much influence they had on the design of the PowerBook G4:
Lam says that Quanta, which has 500 design engineers in Taiwan, did about half of the design work for Apple Computer’s G4 notebook.
