HP TouchPad

HP discontinued the TouchPad tablet less than two months after launching it, due to poor sales figures. Now it looks like the BlackBerry PlayBook may be on a similar deathwatch, as Research in Motion offers promotion after promotion in an effort to convince people to buy the 7 inch tablet.

We haven’t seen any major Android tablet makers exit the market yet, but so far no company is seeing the kind of success Apple has seen in the tablet market yet.

It turns out it’s not just HP and RIM that are dealing with the consequences of lower-than-anticipated sales though. DigiTimes reports that the Taiwanese companies sourced with building these tablets for western companies are laying off staff in response to canceled orders.

Inventec may fire more than 400 people as a result of the HP TouchPad cancellation. Quanta could layoff as many as 1,000 people due to the low demand for BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.

Of course, what these figures don’t tell us is how many people were hired to produce all the new tablets that have flooded the market this year. The Amazon Kindle Fire, for instance, is virtually identical to the BlackBerry PlayBook in many respects, which is unsurprising since it’s also being built by Quanta.

While PlayBook sales may be low, Amazon has already announced that it’s ordered millions of additional Kindle Fire tablets in response to strong pre-orders for that device, even though it won’t start shipping to customers until November 15th.

via Netbook News

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

3 replies on “Sluggish tablet sales leading to Taiwanese factory layoffs?”

  1. Hopefully, the Kindle Fire will prevent large layoffs at Quanta. Of course, the high number of pre-order sales are only based on hype right now. So sales may drastically go down once the new Kindle gets into people’s hands. I’m not convinced Amazon’s first version of their heavily modified Android OS will be smooth, user friendly and stable.

  2. Where is the ZTE Light 2 – 7″ with Pixel Qi.

    If those other tablets had direct sunlight Pixel Screen…then, that would be the killer feature for them all.

    Where is Pixel Qi these days… ?????

    1. All of the devices I’ve read about that had Pixel Qi screens were very expensive considering the rest of the specs. The added premium for the screen isn’t worth it for me.

Comments are closed.