Earlier today Elitegroup Computer Systems, better known as ECS, finalized the agreement for Uniwill Computer. Uniwill, for those not familiar, is a large OEM producer for Fujitsu, but also sells notebooks under its own brand.

ECS will purchase the company in a stock-swap, and further increase the manufacturing and R&D capability of Elitegroup.  The estimated value of this stock-swap is about 108M USD,
The Uniwill purchase adds much needed manufacturing capacity for ECS; Uniwill just completed a massive 51,000 square meter facility capable of producing 7.2M PCs per year in Suzhou, China.  Uniwill's total capacity is about 18M computers per year.

The "Big Four," the top four notebook manufacturers in the world, produce an estimated 70% of the world's notebooks.  The combined capacity of Uniwill and ECS for notebooks will give the company a notebook capacity of about 2.8M notebooks per year. ECS claims this will make the new company the 5th largest notebook manufacturer in Taiwan, and the 6th largest in the world.  Most of the ECS notebooks are sold under other brands; Gateway and Acer are two major OEM clients for ECS already.  Uniwill currently has some OEM orders for Fujitsu, though with the squeeze on the Tier-2 notebook providers this new rally between ECS and Uniwill will give the new company more leverage.

Late last year, ECS also purchased the PC division of the OEM giant Tatung.  Tatung's PC division is one of the largest appliance and electronics manufacturers in Taiwan.  The completion of the ECS takeover of Uniwill will be completed around December 2006.