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Mainboard Makers: Who is Who?

by Anton Shilov
09/21/2002 | 12:26 PM

Manufacturing and selling computer components is a very challenging business nowadays. A lot of companies emerged in 1999 and 2000 when the industry was on the developing rapidly, now that the industry suffers from very low demand, all the vendors, makers and developers try to survive and it becomes quite hard, since there are too many players on this field. The main idea of surviving is not to loose current customers and also possibly attract attention of potential buyers. The retail market sometimes cannot be foreseen, as a result, most of the first and second-tier companies, who have their own manufacturing facilities, try to maintain good relationships with different PC vendors, since the demand from these companies is more or less stable. Nevertheless, all the first-tier Taiwanese companies perform differently, for details, let us take a look at the following table.

First Tier Mainboard Makers: Financial Performance for the First Half of 2002

	ASUS	MSI	Gigabyte	ECS
Revenue (US$ million)	$1114.81	$756.87	$395.6	$925.53
Net Income (US$ million)	$121.54	$46.7	$35.35	$39.1
Gross Margin (%)	15.63%	12.95%	16.32%	9.41%
Pre-tax EPS ($US)	$0.07	$0.10	$0.08	$0.11

As you may note, ASUS is still the most profitable company among the first-tier mainboard makers. It is quite natural, since ASUS not only produces different mainboards and graphics cards, but also sells numerous devices from optical drives to PDAs and mobile phones. In terms of gross margin percentages the company is behind Gigabyte Technology, its EPS is also lower. However, Gigabyte this year is the company that only can boast with its gross margin and EPS. Their sales are the lowest among the first-tier manufacturers, as well as their “pure” net income. Both MSI and ECS continue to climb up and rise their revenues and incomes. Unfortunately for them, they have to lower their prices, as a result, their gross margins are relatively low these days.

All in all, I can conclude that ASUS is still the strongest, while ECS and MSI continue to strengthen their positions on the market. Gigabyte Technology is, basically, the weakest company among the first four Taiwanese mainboard suppliers. Generally, the reason is that Gigabyte seems to concentrate on selling the products to the end-users, while the other are mostly OEM companies.

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