Quanta shipping only 10,000 OLPC XO's per month? Try 100k

Something doesn't add up. Either the Economic Daily News has bad manufacturing numbers or OLPC's claims of $2 Million worth of "donations" each day (more than 10,000 XOs per day!) under the $399 G1G1 program are highly exaggerated. The Chinese-language report says that Quanta expects to ship 15,000 XOs in all of December and only around 8-10k units each month into the future. This according to the paper's "component maker" sources. Of course, OLPC could be multi-sourcing laptops from Foxconn, Compal, or some other Guangdong Province factory -- though that would be news to us. Regardless, with 15,000 XOs heading to Alabama, 260,000 heading to Peru, and countless others in the queue from G1G1, well, our children might be waiting a long, long time for delivery.

Update: According to reader Hao, DigiTimes incorrectly translated the production quantity. EDN is reporting 150,000 XOs shipping in December, then 80k to 100k each month thereafter. That certainly sounds more reasonable. Here's the EDN piece. Thanks Hao!

[cmonkey @ Dec 14th 2007 7:26AM]

I doubt the 10,000 per month numnber is accurate, so I imagine Economic Daily News picked up a bad source somewhere. Given that there are publicly known orders, not including G1G1, of nearly 500,000 XOs, I doubt Quanta would take 4-5 years to fulfill them at 10,000 a month. And that would be not including any future orders that other countries will surely make.

[Hao @ Dec 14th 2007 8:04AM]

It's actually DigiTimes' fault here. Add a 0 to the numbers and they will match those on Economic Daily!

[Thomas Ricker @ Dec 14th 2007 8:42AM]

Hao,

Are you sure? How do you know?

thomas

[Hao @ Dec 14th 2007 9:43AM]

Hi Thomas,

If you read Chinese, here is the link to the Economic Daily artile:

http://udn.com/NEWS/STOCK/STO3/4137427.shtml

It's actually a typical mistake translating from Chinese to English. There is a Chinese word for 10,000, which sounds like "Won," instead of 10 thousand. For example, 100,000 will be 10 "Won." Therefore, it is quite easy to forget the 0 which makes all the difference.

[Hao @ Dec 14th 2007 9:50AM]

And just to makese thing even more complicated...

"1 million" in English will be "100 Won" in Chinese since there is no word for million.

[B @ Dec 14th 2007 1:44PM]

Hao, you da man

[kircheis @ Dec 14th 2007 7:52AM]

Quanta is hardly the bottleneck here. In fact, they were disappointed when the initial orders of 5-8 million fell through:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB119586754115002717.html

G1G1 would probably not have happened otherwise.

Walter Bender stated on December 1st: "Changshu: Mass Production is now very stable. We are using our line at 100%
capacity. Congratulations to Quanta for stabilizing
production just three weeks after MP start."

[kingofwale @ Dec 14th 2007 8:37AM]

What??

A charity program didn't go exactly as the donators have hoped?

I'm SHOCKED!

[Izzi @ Dec 14th 2007 8:59AM]

Got mine last night. I ordered by phone the minute they became available. worst.customer.experience.ever. Nic should be ashamed.

It came yesterday by fed ex. I called yesterday and they "confirmed" that it would ship by UPS before 12/24 and I'd get a tracking number when it shipped.

Did I mention my original order number was 9 nines?

Sheesh. I hope they do a better job with logistics for the kids.

[wayan @ Dec 14th 2007 9:13AM]

Eeegad! This ain't good. In fact, this is downright scary. Please let that be a typo!

[Brodie @ Dec 14th 2007 9:37AM]

It's all a scam... Someone is getting rich off of people who think they're donating a laptop to a third-world child. Someones sprunger must have been working overtime when they came up with this concept...

[SteveS @ Dec 14th 2007 4:49PM]

Ordered a G1G1? No good deed goes unpunished...

[Marjorie McLellan @ Dec 28th 2007 2:22PM]

We ordered three OLPC laptops for an after school program here in Ohio through the Give One. Get One. program. We ordered these quite easily online, over the original November ordering period as we raised donations to support our little project. All three arrived over the weekend. We booted these up and did our initial test run with 11 year old kids. Its a learning experience but we've found it fascinating.