Laptop makers rethink leaving China: share of production outside the mainland to fall to 21%

Diversification of laptop supply chains has started to stall. According to a forecast by Taiwan-based TrendForce, the share of global laptop production outside mainland China will shrink to 21% this year from about 24% in 2025, and will fall below 20% in 2027. Manufacturers that spent recent years moving assembly out of China are now being forced to discuss moving it back: soaring component prices are eating into profits, and running parallel sites in other countries is becoming too expensive.

What the forecast shows

The reversal is small in size but significant in direction. Flipping the numbers, mainland China's share of laptop assembly will be around 79% this year, up from about 76% in 2025, and will exceed 80% in 2027. In two years, the rollback will erase more than four percentage points that the industry had won back from Chinese factories.

TrendForce words it cautiously: brands are reassessing their own production location strategies. But in substance, this is a change of course, not a tactical pause.

• 2025: about 24% of global laptop output came from sites outside mainland China.
• 2026: forecast of 21%.
• 2027: forecast of below 20%.
• The main driver, according to TrendForce: rapidly rising component costs and pressure on margins.

Why money turned out stronger than geography

In recent years, moving production out of China was explained by risk: tariffs, geopolitics, and the desire not to depend on a single country. Those arguments have not gone away. But they hold only as long as a business can afford to pay for the insurance. When components get more expensive and retail prices are hard to raise, a manufacturer has few options: squeeze margins, raise price tags, or cut its own costs.

China offers the most obvious advantage here. Suppliers, logistics, experienced engineers, and assembly capacity are concentrated side by side, and every new site in another country requires rebuilding part of that ecosystem from scratch. In a normal year, discounts, subsidies, and political benefits offset that difference. In a year of expensive components, it becomes more noticeable.

The available excerpt of the report does not break down which components are getting more expensive the fastest. For the market as a whole, pressure on prices for memory and other key parts is linked to AI data centers pulling manufacturing capacity toward themselves. That is context, not a quote from the forecast, but the logic is clear: AI infrastructure is making consumer hardware more expensive.

What buyers and investors should do

For corporate laptop buyers, the main takeaway is simple: do not count on a noticeable drop in device prices in the coming quarters. If brands are moving assembly back to China to save money, their cushion on pricing is thin. Large fleets are better refreshed under fixed-price contracts, with close attention to memory supply terms.

For investors, the signal is different. Factories and contractors in Southeast Asia, India, and Mexico, which were expected to benefit from diversification, risk getting fewer orders than two-year-old plans promised. It is worth watching these sites' utilization in company reports rather than their expansion announcements.

How durable this reversal is remains an open question. If component costs normalize, the economics will tilt back toward distributed production. For now, TrendForce's forecast says that in the hardware industry, cost still has the final say.