original equipment manufacturer (OEM)

Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) refers to hardware manufacturers that produce original components, hard disks, solid-state drives, DVD drives, motherboards, graphics cards, etc.

Computer manufacturing companies use these original products in their computers, which are sold under a different brand name. Various PC manufacturers source all the components as OEM and just assemble the components into a computer.

The term Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) is used equally for systems and also for software. In the case of chip manufacturers, the original chip manufacturers are referred to as Original Chip Manufacturers (OCM).