Quanta downsizing its Taiwan production line due to diminishing orders, RIM's PlayBook to blame

Quanta, one of the largest ODM manufacturers of laptops, netbooks, and, recently, tablets, sacked 1000 workers from its Taiwan production line, with the respective severance pay.

This 3000-strong line was reportedly built purposefully for assembling RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook, but the orders have started to diminish significantly, therefore Quanta decided to cut its losses and move on to greener pastures. The QNX tablet accounts for just about 1% of Quanta's revenue, so the impact won't be significant.

RIM reported just 200 000 units sold in the last quarter, and Quanta allegedly shipped 1.5 million in total, of which RIM has barely sold a million so far. This will probably mean large discounts will be in store for the first PlayBook edition soon, but we doubt the slates will be on a fire sale like the HP TouchPad.

This little episode only comes to demonstrate the cutthroat environment of non-iPad tablets, which appears to be sink or swim, since Asus, for example, is doing pretty well on the wings of products like the successful Eee Pad Transformer model - it scored $124 million in net earnings last quarter.

source: Reuters