DIGITIMES
Date: Friday 24 July 2015
By: Aaron Lee, Taipei; Steve Shen

Many Silicon Valley-based startups have chosen makers in Shenzhen, China, instead of Taiwan-based ODMs, for production of hardware devices for IoT (Internet of Things) applications, according to sources in Taiwan’s notebook supply chain.

The newly established startups are more willing to deal with small-scale makers in Shenzhen because they accept orders for multiple models in small volumes, while Taiwan makers have been focusing on large volume orders, indicated the sources.

The flexibility in production plus government support has made Shenzhen a major production base for the development of hardware related to IoT applications, commented the sources.

Kai-Fu Lee, founder of China-based Innovation Works, has also revealed that he has met with a number of startups in Silicon-Valley recently, but none of them have approached Taiwan makers for hardware production because their order quantities were rather limited, totaling several thousand or several tens of thousands of units only.     [FULL  STORY]