The consensus in Taiwan is that Acer Inc will land that near-$2,000m OEM contract to do much of IBM Corp’s personal computer manufacturing for it, as predicted (CI No 2,991). IBM is not commenting, and it is not clear whether the deal would affect Greenock or only IBM’s manufacturing bases in Raleigh, North Carolina and Austin, Texas, but Associated Press hears that Acer would be required to ship between 70,000 and 80,000 computers a month to IBM, starting in the first quarter of next year and extending into 1998. Acer says the talk is currently all of desktop machines, but that laptops could be included too. Acer says it will build 450,000 desktop computers alltogether this year.
