Despite the world’s love affair with the iPad and other tablets, and ongoing economic concerns (particularly the debt-crisis in Europe), sales of plain old fashioned laptops are still strong. According to Focus Taiwan, Quanta, the world’s largest contract laptop manufacturer, reported record laptop sales in June. The Taiwanese company, responsible for manufacturing laptops for Dell and many other companies, is said to have shipped 4.8 million laptops in June – $3.1 billion worth.
Both numbers are new records for the company, which also saw improved sales between January and April, but a slight drop in May.
Enterprise adoption of the iPad has been swift and IBM has speculated that tablets could take the place of notebooks for executives. But Quanta’s sales show that for the time being, the laptop is still the king of the mobile enterprise.
Focus Taiwan cited analysts crediting the higher sales to economic stabilization in the eurozone. According InfoWorld, Quanta credits the strong sales in part to customers putting in July orders early, and the easing of shortages of certain Intel components such as the Core i3 and Core i5. But April was also a record setting month for the manufacturer, and it expects strong sales in August as well.
Despite strong hardware sales, Quanta has been expanding into cloud services as well. Earlier this month, Quanta announced a partnership with Taiwan’s largest telecom, Chunghwa Telecom, to begin providing cloud computing services. The partnership followed Quanta’s cloud computing partnership with MIT.
Image: a GRiD Compass, one of the world’s first laptops. Via Old Computers.
