IBM Corp is said to be considering the placement of major OEM orders with Taiwan’s Acer Inc. According to Taiwan’s Commercial Times, IBM may place orders starting with the second quarter of 1999 for low-end products. Acer claims to be the second largest shipper of PCs in the world, ahead of IBM itself and behind Compaq Computer Corp. It shipped nearly six million last year, most of them to OEMs – a figure that doesn’t include PCs built on a contract basis for other manufacturers. At the end of last month Inventec Corp, the Taiwan-based maker of notebook PCs, agreed to buy Digital Equipment Corp’s Taoyuan County plant for around $32m, and will supply DEC’s new parent Compaq with systems made at the plant (CI No 3,485).
