There is a lot of things happening in PCs this year, as late as last week HP announced it was considering to leave the PC market. Samsung has contacted notebook OEM manufacturers in Taiwan to outsource the manufacturing of notebooks. It has contacted Quanta, Compal and Pegatron and some believe this is a sign of Samsung preparing to acquire HP’s PC division.
Samsung is one of the big players in the semiconductor industry, but not one of the bigger players in the PC industry. There have been talk since the beginning of the year among panel and monitor manufacturers that HP is talking to Samsung about selling its PC division to Samsung.
Samsung today manufactures all notebooks internally, where it has plants in China and have contacted several OEM companies without results. This time it invited Quanta, Compal and Pegatron to the Hq in South Korea to discuss outsourcing portions of its operation. The source to Digitimes says that this is an indication for Samsung preparing to expand its operation.
While it many times is a good thing to keep the manufacturing internally it is hard to compete against OEM manufacturers as their production efficiency and cost control is hard to match globally. The latest rumors about Samsung acquiring HP’s PC division means Samsung will have to rely on OEM players since it lacks the capacity to make and ship a complete HP assortment.
In 2011 Samsung is expected to ship 10 million notebooks, while HP has ordered 40 million notebooks from multiple OEM manufacturers. That number does not include HP’s enterprise series like ProBook and EliteBook that HP intends to keep. Samsung will be forced to rely on OEM manufacturers according to the source, at least the first years when it needs to ship 50 – 60 million notebooks with its own and HP’s PC division for 2012.
Whether there will be an acquisition or not we don’t knkow, but there is no other player that has shown interest in HP’s operation as far as we know. OEM manufacturer Inventec says that it is possible that HP is just testing the market reaction of its announcement and that it will make a decision based on the feedback.
