NEC-Lenovo Collaboration May Have Drastic Effects on Notebook Market

It has only been days since rumors arose about a possible cooperation between NEC and Lenovo, but market watchers are already speculating about what such a deal could do to the notebook market.

News about joint ventures or temporary cooperations are fairly common on the IT market, but a very (arguably) unusual one was hinted at the other day.

Supposedly, Lenovo and NEC were considering a partnership, although not many details were given and neither has anything been confirmed.

Even despite all this, however, certain parties have already started to talk about how big an impact such an alliance would have on the market, at least the one in Taiwan.

For those in need of a refresh, NEC is based in Japan, whereas Lenovo has its headquarters in China.

Per Digitimes' sources, any merger or collaboration would take time, because integrating their resources into a single whole will not be possible to achieve immediately (each outfit has its own supply chain).

On the other hand, once such a thing was completed, their economical scale would expand and lead to lower component cost or order accumulation.

Notebook makers would also end up offering better manufacturing quotes and future orders may end up shifted.

In other words, those companies that actually manufacture their products may end up with severely changed business conditions, since it would not be guaranteed that they would be getting the same amount of orders.

NEC has already shifted orders from the retiring FIC and Arima to Quanta and Compal, while Lenovo outsources to the likes of Wistron, Quanta, Flextronics and others.

Meanwhile, Lenovo ships about 30 million systems each year, 20 million, give or take, being notebooks.

NEC is currently the biggest PC brand in Japan and ships about 2.5-3 million systems worldwide each year, though it has began to focus less on Europe and China.