Digitimes reports that the mainboard industry lived through the crisis quite successfully, according to "Commercial Times". The overall supplies from Taiwan (they make around 90% of this market) will turn equal to 79.8 million pieces this year, which is only 4.5% smaller than last year. Moreover, they expect the overall supplies to get even greater next year. However, we don’t think that this forecast is equally optimistic for all the mainboard makers.
This year four largest mainboard manufacturers, namely Elitegroup, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI, are expected to sell 51 million of boards, which makes 63.9% of all the Taiwanese sales and 55% of the global market. The sales of other mainboard manufacturers are also expected to grow but not that significantly, and the sales of some manufacturers should drop greatly (take for instance, Biostar) particularly because the share of the "Big Four" will increase. We would also like to add that the members of the "Big Four" owe their strong positions to the potential for further production increase in China.
That is why we can suppose that the tendency will remain next year as well: the share of the large manufacturers will keep growing, and that of the weakest will get extremely small. it is also quite possible that some of the "weak" companies will be purchased by the members of the "Big Four". However, these are just our assumptions, we’ll see if they are true or not...