Contract manufacturer Solectron Corp. sourced the raw materials, made the circuit boards and did the assembly.
Companies like Solectron pay 10% to 12% more for electricity in Mexico than in other countries.
Singapore's Flextronics (12, FLEX) is now the world's biggest electronics contract manufacturer, having just acquired competitor Solectron.
Sun, Oracle, Solectron, Cirrus Logic and hundreds of other firms all have at least one foreign founder.
Now, Hon Hai is so much larger that even after a merger announced in June between Flextronics and Solectron Corp.
In part to break NCR from its manufacturing past, Nyberg sold three NCR plants in April 1997 to Solectron Corp.
The surge in outsourcing has made fortunes for shareholders in such companies as Solectron in Milpitas, California, and Flextronics International in Singapore.
But Alejandro Gomez , senior vice president for Solectron's Latin America business, says a lack of skilled workers could crimp that growth.
The news was closely followed by cutbacks by the Telecoms firm Solectron, based in Cwmcarn, which axed 350 jobs in June last year.
Most big computer makers no longer build what they sell, but outsource production to huge, albeit lesser-known providers of manufacturing services such as Flextronics or Solectron.
Singapore's Flextronics (12, FLEX ) is now the world's biggest electronics contract manufacturer, having just acquired competitor Solectron (nyse: SLR - news - people ).
Ten years ago outfits like Solectron and Jabil hardly existed.
Huge contract manufacturers like Flextronics and Solectron are buying more parts directly from suppliers, cutting out distributors, while prices for chips (half of Arrow's total sales) drop 30% annually.
Solectron (nyse: SLR - news - people ), a contract manufacturer, has moved production of more complex products like high-end servers and set-top boxes from the U.S. to Mexico in recent years.
In the past two months Solectron, the biggest of them also known as electronic manufacturing service (EMS) companies announced that it would miss analysts' revenue targets for the current quarter and lay off 9, 000 employees, 11% of its work force.
When orders for Visors come in over the website (hosted by yet another company), the information is fed first to its fulfillment partner, which keeps the inventory, then directly to Handspring's contract manufacturers, Flextronics and Solectron, which also package and ship the product.
"I believe FLEX has positioned itself very well for this through its purchase of Solectron and the success it has had this year in co-designing some of Hewlett-Packard's recent hits in the notebook and netbook space, " he says, adding that Flextronics should trade in the "double digits" next year.
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