ECS and FIC to Manufacture Mainboards for HP

by Anton Shilov
04/17/2003 | 01:29 PM

It seems that HP has decided to share all its mainboard orders between different Taiwanese and Chinese manufactures in an attempt to lower production costs. According to a report from DigiTimes, Taiwan, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) and First International Computer (FIC) had landed orders from the world’s number one PC vendor to produce mainboards.

Since HP needs to produce very low-cost products so to compete with Dell in the low-end market segment, it definitely needed an additional partner for mainboards because its present partners, namely ASUS and Foxconn, cannot accept all its orders simply because of economic expediency.

Reportedly, ECS will produce consumer-oriented mainboards (the cheapest ones), while FIC will take care of mainboards for computers intended for commercial users. None of the companies confirmed orders from HP.

With ECS low-cost policy and usual not very high gross-margins, the company is likely to benefit from HP orders since it means stable and continuous profit, while selling inexpensive mainboards in retail while the pressure there is increases with ASUS’ X-series and ASRock mainboards gaining popularity may be a less trivial task. FIC used to manufacture mainboards for HP in the past, so, this way of making business is not new for the company.