Quanta, 3M Set Up Touch-panel Joint Venture

Taipei, March 21, 2011 (CENS)--The Taiwan-based Quanta Computer Inc., one of the world's largest two notebook PC makers, has inked an agreement with U.S.'s 3M Co. to set up a joint venture of touch panel production, marking the beginning of its entry into the increasingly competitive segment.

Increasing popularity of smartphones and the rise of tablet PCs have triggered fierce touch-panel competition among Taiwanese high-tech firms, promoting some of them to take different strategies to strengthen competiveness.

For example, Hon Hai Group has been planning to spin off Chimei Innolux Corp.'s touch-panel business unit into a new separate company; Compal Electronics Inc. has raised its investment in its touch-panel subsidiary Henghao Technology Co. while acquiring a panel fabrication factory from Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd.

The Quanta-3M joint venture will be headquartered in Singapore and specialize in manufacturing projective capacitive touch panels, with front-end production lines to be set in the country, and back-end lines in China.

After extensive audit procedures for existing multi-touch technologies, C.C. Liang, vice president of Quanta, stressed that his firm regards 3M as one of the best touchscreen solutions, which has been adopted in its all-in-one PCs shipped to HP since last year.

To expand their cooperation on touch panels, the two firms has decided to set up the joint venture to produce projective capacitive touch panels, in a bid to jointly explore the rapidly growing market for touch-panel applications. In the future, touchscreen solutions jointly developed by the companies will be used by Quanta in its all-in-one PCs, monitors, netbook PCs, notebook PCs and tablet PCs. However, the firm stressed, the cooperation won't extend to production of small-sized models used in smartphones.

Scale of Global Market for Touch Panels
Year	Market Demand
2008	40 million units
2009	50 million units
2010	80 million units
2011	98 million units
2012	1.161 billion units
2013	1.341 billion units
2014	1.538 billion units
2015	1.735 billion units

Source: iSuppli