Dell denies plan to close plants in Ireland

Dell has stated that no such plan to shift assembly operations exists

Dell has denied a report that it plans to shut down its notebook PC assembly lines in Ireland.

Taiwan-based technology newspaper DigiTimes reported that Tan Say Peng, director of Dell's South Asia service business unit, said recently that all of Dell's notebook assembly operations would be handled in Malaysia in future.

Tan was speaking at the opening of Dell's new enterprise service and support centre in Penang on Wednesday.

However, Judy Low, a Dell spokeswoman in Singapore, told vnunet.com that the report was "over generalised" and "incorrect".

"Tan was referring only to the production of notebooks for the US market," she said, pointing out that Dell runs notebook assembly plants worldwide, not just in Ireland and Malaysia as the report suggested.

Low stated that no such plan to shift assembly operations exists, but did not rule out future changes in Dell's logistics strategy.

"Of course, the possibility [of a shift in notebook assembly operations] exists in the future, but only as something we might look into," she said. " There is certainly no time frame for it."

Penang already accounts for 95 per cent of Dell's US and South Asia notebook assembly, according to Dell executives who spoke at the opening ceremony.

Dell's first manufacturing centre in Ireland opened in 1990 to serve the EMEA markets. The US company currently runs three such centres in Limerick, and employs 4,000 in the city.

Major brand name PC vendors like Dell typically outsource most manufacturing to contract manufacturers in Asia, but will handle the final assembly of desktop and notebook PCs themselves.

This allows them to give end users a choice of components like CPUs, hard disk drives and memory, and reduces the losses caused by rapidly fluctuating prices of such components.