Chromebook shipments to grow 100% year-on-year due to back-to-school trend, Quanta receives urgent order

The September back-to-school rush is approaching in the United States, but there is a severe shortage of educational laptops. Students are facing the problem of "no laptops to go to school", and brand manufacturers are urgently looking for support from Quanta. In response to the huge demand for urgent orders in the US market, Quanta's Shanghai Songjiang plant has expanded its recruitment of general workers. New employees can receive a bonus of up to RMB 4,500 within 90 days of joining the company.

This is a rare case in many years for a major laptop OEM to recruit general workers on a large scale in mainland China, highlighting that the related orders are coming in quickly and urgently. Quanta's existing production lines are unable to cope with them, so it can only expand recruitment to speed up production and shipment.

Currently, Lenovo, HP and Dell, the world's three largest computer companies, have notified school districts in the United States that they are short of nearly 5 million laptops. School districts in 15 states in the United States have stated that they are affected by the shortage of laptops.

According to information released by Quanta, the general workers recruited by the Shanghai factory this time include nine categories: inspectors, instructors, property managers, quality auditors, quality control personnel, maintenance personnel, SMT operators, multi-skilled workers, hand soldering and spray painting workers, pipe makers, and intimate group members.

Quanta's Shanghai plant is the main production base for laptops, servers and new consumer electronic products. Quanta's rare recruitment of general workers coincides with Chairman Barry Lam's previous revelation that orders for laptops and cloud servers will be seen at least until the end of this year.

Legal persons pointed out that Quanta Computer has the largest market share in the global education laptop (Chromebook ODM) market, accounting for more than 60% of the market share. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven the demand for online education, especially in the United States in September when the school is back, and the demand for Chromebooks is stronger than previously expected. It is estimated that the global Chromebook shipments in 2020 are expected to increase by nearly 100% year-on-year, mainly benefiting from the demand in the United States and Japan.

In addition, strong demand for Macbooks also helped increase Quanta's shipments.

Benefiting from the strong demand in the notebook market and enthusiastic orders from customers, Quanta Computer regained its position as the world's leading notebook PC OEM in the second quarter, with 14.5 million notebook PCs shipped in the quarter, a 99% quarter-on-quarter and 67% year-on-year increase, which was better than expected. In the first half of the year, notebooks accounted for 50% of its revenue, and it is expected to surpass Compal for the whole year and return to the top of notebook PC shipments. With strong order demand, the demand for general workers has also increased.

As for other laptop OEM factories, Wistron's Kunshan plant has also expanded its recruitment of general workers, with a self-referral bonus of RMB 1,800 and an internal referral bonus of RMB 3,600.

Compal's Kunshan plant also offers internal referral bonuses to attract talent. For each referral of one person, the referrer and the referee can receive RMB 1,500. For five referrals, one can receive RMB 15,500; for eight referrals, one can receive RMB 24,800; and for 12 referrals, one can receive RMB 37,200.