Is producing a commodity at huge scale supposed to be some kind of bad thing?
Isn't that what most of the Fortune 500 does?
I doubt the margins differ too much than selling to dell or HP. They're cutting out the middleman, but quanta is still selling to volume customers, at the sort of margins that volume customers expect. It was a commodity space for OEMs before their customers became their end users.
But the point is they're becoming less of a commodity. They're moving up the value food chain to both manufacture and sell their servers under their own brand. Presumably their margins are better now then before.
IMO their brand isn't worth anything and they can't really charge any more than Supermicro, so they don't have much room to add margin.
"We build for facebook, rackspace, and IBM"is rather marketable, especially with larger/corporate customers which are the bread and butter of the big name vendors.
Very few if any organizations buy servers on the scale of Facebook, Amazon, Rackspace.... Quanta are likely to face the "Walmart" problem where they get squeezed so hard on margins they might not be making much at all, yet they feel they can't afford to ignore buyers of that size because someone is going to sell all those servers to them.