14 DAY TRIAL // Not a week seems to go by without some company on the IT market announcing layoffs. Compal is the one firing a number of people, all of them from tablet research, development and testing.
For those who don't know of Compal, it is arguably understandable that they may not. The company doesn't actually make own-branded products.
For those that do know of Compal, it is just as, perhaps even more, understandable. The company does, after all, manufacture many of the notebooks sold by Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, HP and Fujitsu.
Back in 2011, Compal decided to prepare in case it got orders for tablets. Unfortunately, it ended up overestimating the level of demand.
Now that it has become clear that orders have and will stay short of initial expectations (Acer and Lenovo are its main customers), the company is reversing its decision to recruit staff members.
Unfortunately, that means that over 100 people from the testing and research and development departments have to find work elsewhere.
It doesn't really help that the notebook supply chain is under pressure as well. The silver lining, if it can even be called that, is that this is the only string of layoffs planned.
All things considered, Compal is actually getting off easy. Thanks to the nature of its business, and the youth and, thus, small size of the tablet division, it can avoid situations where it has to break the bad news to thousands.
On that note, Sony (2,000 people getting the pink slip), Sharp (11,000 are getting sacked) and Advanced Micro Devices, of all companies (15% of all employees around the world) have it much worse.
Given the high prices of Windows 8 slates, and the likelihood of sales to be low because of them, we can't say we foresee anything promising for tablet makers at this point.