Foxconn, a company that was little known in the channel market just a couple of years ago, may become a leading brand-name in the computer parts market, believe its rivals. Being very large company, Foxconn has tremendous influence on the market in general and its plans to manufacture its own graphics cards may reshuffle that market significantly.

China Economic News Service (CENS) web-site cited mainboard makers as saying that according to their analysis, Foxconn has enough power to reshuffle the market of graphics cards and join the list of leading brand-names in the market, such as Asustek Computer, Microstar International (MSI) and Gigabyte Technology. Foxconn already supplies several computer makers and several third-party add-in-card suppliers with its graphics cards, which means that the firm has enough experience in the appropriate manufacturing.

According to Foxconn representatives’ claims made at CeBIT 2006, the company has limited growth opportunities with its current business model and addressing the channel markets more aggressively should allow the firm to continue increasing its revenues.

Sapphire Technologies, which is a part of  PC Partner holding, manufactures a lot of graphics cards under orders by ATI Technologies and it also makes quite some own-brand graphics card products. However, sources close to Sapphire usually blame ATI for undersupplying graphics chips, something, which limits the company’s growth. Foxconn reportedly planned to use graphics chips from both ATI and Nvidia Corp., which means less risk and dependency.

Smaller graphics cards makers, which usually have exclusive relations with one supplier of graphics chips, are likely to face increased competition from bigger companies, who have relations with both ATI and Nvidia. The results of such competition may be merges between second- and third-tier makers of graphics cards.