Slow PlayBook sales force Quanta to fire over 1000 staff members

World's largest PC maker reduces staff count from 3000 to less than 2000 as RIM struggles to shift BlackBerry tablets.

According to Reuters, the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer said it would keep staff levels at the production line to a minimum, as order visibility remains unknown and also declined to disclose the client that affected production, says the report. Local media recently reported that the client was RIM.

Last week, RIM confirmed that just 700,000 BlackBerry tablets sold from 1.5m shipped. Although analysts anticipated 600,000 PlayBook tablets would be shipped in Q2, the actual amount was 200,000, a steep drop from 490,000 in Q1 compared to 9.25 million iPads.

Arthur Liao, Fubon Securities analyst is sure that the cut in PlayBook production will have a limited impact on Quanta however, as he says RIM accounts for less than one per cent of Quanta's revenue.

It's all further evidence of the perils of trying to cut into Apple's domination of the tablet market.

Last month, HP announced it will freeze its TouchPad tablet project, as the product has failed to compete with Apple's iPad.

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