This week, lorries will pick up several thousand Acer computers from a factory owned by Quanta, the world’s largest notebook contract manufacturer, in the western Chinese city of Chongqing. Though unseen by consumers, the shipment will kick off the largest change in global PC manufacturing and logistics in more than a decade.
Driven by a surge in labour and land costs as well as labour shortages in China’s established export manufacturing hubs around Shanghai and just over the border from Hong Kong, the world’s largest PC vendors and the half-dozen contract manufacturers serving them are moving inland.
The PC industry is setting up vast new factories, development and logistics centres in the cities of Chongqing and Chengdu in western China.