As reported by Financial Times increasing raw material prices and labor costs in China will increase lap top prices. The world’s three leading contract manufacturers of Laptops – Quanta, Compal and Wistron -are now in talks with HP, Dell and Acer on how to move on the price increases to the consumers.
The first reflection on this is that this is all great news. Over the last 10 years we have seen the most dramatic reduction in world poverty ever. Hundreds of million of Chinese people have climbed over the line for extreme poverty (1 USD per day at PPP). World trade is driving increased salaries and the wealth in China is consuming a lot of raw materials making raw material prices to rocket. The rich and the middle income countries are now paying for the poverty reduction by adding some 100€ per laptop. We can afford it!
The second reflection is that the consolidation in the computer industry has now come pretty far and maybe we are starting to see some oligopolistic pricing? The numbers of both branded vendors and their contract manufactures are now much smaller than some years ago. And why are they all staying in China? Maybe they should move on to less expensive countries? In any event, there are still some vendors left and we as purchasers have to continue to keep the competition up. So here is the short list for your next RFQ: Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, Lenovo, Sony and Toshiba.
