Inventec Corporation
Whoever owns the distribution channel owns the business. We are just the guys behind the scenes .

- Inventec executive Louis Woo In Inventec Corp.'s gleaming new manufacturing compound on the outskirts of Shanghai's Pudong district, six automated assembly lines hummed with state of the art equipment. Hermetically sealed machines dispensed adhesive onto tiny boards. ext, high speed machines picked micro chip components off tapes and placed them onto the boards. Other machines soldered, cleaned and tested, until the guts of a notebook personal computer (PC) popped out to be encased in black plastic or metallic silver by human hands. Each line produced a new notebook computer every 16 seconds, for a combined output of 13,500 PCs per day . However, none of these PCs carried the Inventec name. Instead, the notebooks produced in this Chinese factory bore the brand logos of three competing multinational computer companies. Each PC was packaged in a brand manufacturer box, and shipped to client distribution centers around the world. Some were shipped via UPS from the Shanghai factory directly to consumers in the United States, with return address labels bearing the name and U.S. address of the brand company. Inventec, with annual revenues topping 150 billion ew Taiwan Dollars (NT$)a and market capitalization valued at over $1 billion, was one of Taiwan's leading Original Design Manufacturers (ODM). ODMs designed and manufactured electronic products such as computers, servers, MP3 players, PDAs and cellular telephones for client companies that marketed the products globally. In early 2005, scenes like the one above were taking place simultaneously in at least 10 Taiwanese ODM PC factories in and around Shanghai. Taiwan's four major notebook PC manufacturers were expected to account for nearly 60% of world production in 2005.1 Inventec had been one of