by Alex Scroxton
4 April 2008
Major PC vendors are scrambling to source alternate supplies of laptop batteries after the industry was hit by the second major fire in a facility in the Far East in a month.
At the end of February LCD supplies were hit by a blaze at the Lite-On Technology plant in Taiwan, but the latest disaster occurred at the start of the month at the LGChem plant in Seoul, South Korea, which churns out around 13.5 million batteries a month.
One of the biggest casualties of the latest fire was the vendor behind the popular Eee PC range, Asus. Vice-president Kevin Lin told a news conference the fire could affect up to 40 per cent of its second quarter shipments.
Computer 2000 general manager PC systems, Mark Glasspool, said the fire has badly affected supplies of the Eee PC, which were already hard to obtain.
"We can’t get enough of them, we’re anticipating it will be a challenge for the next couple of months," he said.
Dell, the vendor, said: "We’ll work with other battery suppliers – including LG - to maintain consistent availability."
An HP spokesperson said the full impact of the fire on its business was yet to be determined, but added that it was working "aggressively" within the battery cell industry to secure additional supply and that it used multiple sources to get components to use in its notebooks.
Eszter Morvay, senior research analyst at IDC, said that high demand for notebooks was already squeezing suppliers such as LG to deliver higher volumes.
