OEM is short for Original Equipment Manufacturer. It is a term that is heard a lot in Automotive and Information Technology.

OEM is the creation or development of one or more parts in a product consisting of many parts by another company.

Most computers contain components manufactured by more than one company. For example, HP does not manufacture all components in an HP notebook. These companies use components from other manufacturers when designing computers.

For example, the HP laptop may contain an AMD processor and a Samsung SSD. AMD will be the processor OEM and Samsung the storage device OEM. An iMac may contain an Intel processor and Micron RAM. In this case, Intel and Micron are the respective OEMs.