With more emerging countries participating in the OLPC program, first-year shipments of the OLPC notebooks (now called XO), which are expected to start in July this year, are likely to top 10 million units, up from the eight million units as originally estimated, noted the sources.

While the retail price for an XO is likely tagged at US$150, the current BOM (bill of materials) for the portable device reach as high as US$140, leaving component suppliers and the end-producer (Quanta) to share a tiny difference of US$10, the sources indicated.

However, the production scale of the XO notebooks could probably climb, in two years, to 50-100 million units, which is more than all the laptops produced everywhere in 2005, contended Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the nonprofit OLPC program and former head of MIT Media Lab, in an interview for the upcoming February 12 issue of Newsweek magazine.