Well, its high time we made a preliminary summary of the "Bug Four" big race, which lasted all year and which we have watched very carefully all the time. Let’s have a look at the table below showing the preliminary results for the four largest mainboard manufacturers, according to Digitimes:

Company	Mainboard Supplies, million pieces
	Actual Shipments in 2001	Total Plan for 2001	Achieved
ECS	14.92	15	99.5%
ASUS	14.7	18	81.7%
MSI	11-12	12	91.7%-100%
Gigabyte	10.08	13	77.5%

And now as usual, we would like to make a few comments:

• We would like to stress once again that this is only preliminary data, so this table may undergo some changes later on. Although we don’t think that these changes will be too significant.
• We have finally got some more or less exact info on ASUS, which didn’t turn out that impressive, as we have actually expected (see this news story). Firstly, the company is still lagging a bit behind Elitegroup, and secondly, ASUS turned out too far away from their initial plans.
• Despite the absence of any exact stats for MSI, it is almost evident that its will win the third place in the "local competition", and the last, fourth, position will belong to Gigabyte this time.
• The achievements of Elitegroup and ASUS Companies are very close, however, we have to stress that Elitegroup has been always a bit ahead of the competitor in H2 2001 as far as the monthly mainboard shipments go. So, we will regard Elitegroup as the current leader in the mainboard supplies.
• We would also like to praise Elitegroup for impressive accuracy in complying with their initial plans. MSI also deserves all the best here. The worst accuracy was shown by Gigabyte, which failed to reach even the 80% bar.