The world’s largest contract manufacturer of notebook PCs, Compal Electronics Inc., will build a production facility in Vietnam .

The Taiwan-based China Economic News Service (CENS) has said that Taiwan 's Compal has looked at Vietnam in the past, but with pronounced labour shortages in southeastern China , the company is revisiting its plans. The new plant is expected to be finished in the second half of 2010 at the earliest, according to published reports.

Taiwan 's notebook sector has been growing since the beginning of this year. Compal scored almost 3 billion USD in consolidated sales in January, surging 161 percent year-on-year and up 2.4 percent from the preceding month. The company shipped between 4.3 million and 4.4 million notebooks in January, standing firmly as the world's largest notebook contract manufacturer.

Compal President J.T. Chen said his company will expand production capacity in the Kunshan plant in China 's Jiangsu province while speeding up the construction of a new plant in Vietnam .

Besides Compal, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the world's leading provider of electronic manufacturing services, has announced a 200 million USD investment project to build a cellphone plant in northern Vietnam . The proposed plant is estimated to output 89 million cellphones per year./.