China-based notebook brand vendor Lenovo has placed strong notebook orders to its Taiwan OEM partners in the second quarter mainly for China's Labor Day holidays in May and the company is expected to see the strongest sequential shipment growth among the top-tier vendors, while Taiwan-based brands Acer and Asustek Computer also placed strong order volumes for the quarter, according to sources from notebook makers.
The sources pointed out that Acer and Lenovo both reduced their notebook inventories to a very low level in January and February in order to allow the new products to show up all at once and the two players have already started increasing their orders after March.
The sources believe that if Lenovo had a strong sales during China's Labor Day holidays, the company's order volume may have chance to extend to summer.
As both Lenovo and Acer are expected to see strong sales in the second quarter, their main OEM partners - Compal Electronics and Wistron are expected to benefit the most; however, the two players have both declined to comment on their clients and currently also do not have forecasts for the second quarter.
As for the upstream OEM side, due to Intel's defective chip incident has pushed back the shipment schedule of notebook players, notebook makers all currently seeing strong pressure as both their first-tier and second-tier clients are all demanding for delivery at the same time and is causing the makers to have tight supply.
As for Hewlett-Packard (HP), sources from upstream supply chain estimated that the company placed orders for over four million notebooks in March, helping the company to have total shipment volume of nine million units for the first quarter, but since the overall supply chain is having tight capacity, parts of the company's March orders will be delayed to April.