The financial crisis has already impacted the personal computer (PC) industry and it will inevitably impact the market of computer components as well. According to Goldman Sachs investment bank, the mainboard industry will suffer a huge decline in the coming months and throughout the whole 2009.

According to estimates of Goldman Sachs, already in Q4 2008 shipments of mainboards will decline by 15% with 2009 likely to be the worst for the motherboard industry since 2001, when the market nearly collapsed. The report was cited by Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) news-paper (excepts from the article were translated by DigiTimes web-site).

The sources of problems of mainboard makers lie not only in the financial crisis, but also in lowering demand towards typical desktops. Nowadays consumers demand small form-factor (SFF) desktops or notebooks, the markets that are not supported by a number of second-tier of mainboard makers.

One of the major issues for motherboard producers has been cut-throat competition between all the players on the market, which led to decreases of prices, increases of production costs due to improvement of complexities and so on.

The new crisis on the mainboards market is likely to catalyze many smaller makers to either exit the market or merge with others.