cost notebooks for the One Laptop per Child project in September after a nine-month delay, partly caused by a redesign. Quanta will make 40,000 notebooks a month for the One Laptop project from Sept. 22, Michail Bletsas, a network design executive at the charity, said Monday in Taipei. Taoyuan, Taiwan-based Quanta last month said changes to add memory and a faster chip delayed production, without giving a time frame.
The One Laptop per Child project, started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, aims to give away as many as 100 million computers to students in developing nations. Rwanda, Cambodia and Libya are among countries that have signed up for the program. Shipments of the laptop were due to begin in the fourth quarter of last year, the organization said in December 2005.
Quanta will increase production to 400,000 units a month by the end of the year, Bletsas said on the sidelines of an industry conference. Each laptop costs US$175 to make, with expenses to fall to US$100 by the end of 2008, he said. Three million will be made in the first round of production, Bletsas said.
Tim Li, Quanta's spokesman, couldn't be reached at his office and mobile phones for comment.
Shares of Quanta Computer fell 0.9 percent to NT$47.95 in Taipei. The stock lost 10 percent in the past six months, against a 10 percent advance in the benchmark TAIEX index.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the world's second-largest maker of computer processors, is the primary supplier of chips for the laptop, according to the OLPC Web site.
