Apple is expected to shift a major portion of its MacBook orders to Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) in 2018 instead of its old practice of giving most of the orders to Quanta Computer, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Foxconn is expected to begin mass shipments to fulfill the new orders in the second quarter of 2018, said the sources.

Foxconn and Quanta both declined to comment on their clients or orders.

The sources pointed out that Apple started outsourcing the assembly for some of MacBooks' components to Foxconn's plants in Shenzhen, China in the second half of 2017.

Despite the fact that Foxconn will see a major increase in MacBook orders in 2018, Quanta is expected to remain the largest MacBook supplier to Apple in the year, said the sources.

Digitimes Research's figures show that the upstream supply chain has shipped around 15 million MacBooks a year to Apple with the shipment ratio for Quanta and Foxconn at around 8:2 for the past five years. In 2017, Quanta had a 79.5% share and Foxconn 20.5%.

The sources revealed that Foxconn had been aggressively working to land more MacBook orders from Apple during the past few years by offering attractive quotes. Since Apple has not had a major upgrade to its MacBook product line since the releases of its new MacBook Pro devices at the end of 2016 and has no plan for one in 2018, the US-based vendor is planning to shift orders for models that are already in mass production to Foxconn to save costs and reduce risks.

To minimize the impact from the loss of orders, Quanta has been pushing to acquire orders from other brand vendors recently during their request for quotation (RFQ) processes.

Lenovo currently has over 50% of its notebooks made by its in-house manufacturing subsidiary, while the rest is shared between Compal Electronics and Wistron. Dell's orders are also mainly handled by Compal and Wistron.

Quanta is currently the largest notebook suppliers for Hewlett-Packard (HP), Apple, Acer and Asustek Computer.

Quanta shipped 38.7 million notebooks in 2017, up 5% on year and expects its notebook shipments to see a growth similar to the market's average in 2018.

In addition to notebooks, Quanta is also seeing growth in its server shipments and has been developing augmented reality (AR) HMD to seek emerging business opportunities.