As China eases COVID-19 restrictions to reduce economic impact and ease social tensions, it will backfire as the spread of the disease could create labor shortages. There is a possibility. Digi Times First-quarter notebook product launches may be impacted by the country’s current labor shortage, according to Tuesday’s report.
After China lifted some of its pandemic restrictions, some Chinese notebook supply chain companies saw up to 50% of their workforce affected by the infection, temporarily halting production lines, the report said. I’m here. This of course causes delays in shipments and ultimately impacts the availability of real products such as new laptops with the latest CPUs and GPUs. The situation of COVID-19 and labor shortage is expected to worsen after the Chinese New Year due to poor health and long vacations.
Large notebook ODMs (Compal, Inventec, Quanta, and Wistron) have yet to experience component shortages or labor shortages. On the other hand, large PC OEMs still have inventory to sell and don’t expect overwhelming demand in the first quarter, so they didn’t ask their production partners to ramp up production in the first quarter. This will mitigate the impact of COVID-19 infections and vacations somewhat. Meanwhile, the major PC maker is still plagued by a shortage of production capacity, and the only question is how this will affect his PC market globally.
It remains to be seen if the big PC suppliers will choose to delay product launches if their production partners can’t manufacture enough hardware, but this is certainly a possibility. It will be interesting to decide whether to prioritize the launch of expensive parts or focus on the performance mainstream systems, which are relatively high-volume products.
It should be noted that only about 10% to 15% of workers are actually infected, according to the report. On the other hand, many employees take time off from work due to fear of infection. This situation will continue until herd immunity is achieved in China.
