... to increase its presence in the chipset market. As is known, the company is planning to win a share of about 30% in the discrete chipsets market (chipset without the integrated graphics core) and to impose as much influence on other market sectors as possible. Extremely aggressive pricing policy is definitely a part of this plan. It will allow SiS to sell all its chipsets in a wink (in fact, SiS chipsets are sold out long before they are actually produced).
The only but not very grave problem is very weak production capacities of the company. For instance, there were only 3 million chipsets sold for the entire Q1 2001 (for a better comparison here are some numbers from VIA: only in March the company sold over 5 million units).
However, SiS does its best here as well in order to improve the situation. The company reports that they are no longer using 0.3 micron technologies and up for chips manufacturing, having left this field to other companies. Now SiS is focusing totally on the mainboard chipsets. Here are some forecasts regarding this year’s production growth:

• Q1 2001 – 39 thousand 200mm wafers;
• Q2 2001 – 59 thousand (up to 5 million chipsets are expected to be sold);
• Q3 2001 – 72 thousand;
• Q4 2001 – 80 thousand, i.e. the per quarter amount should double by the end of the year.

There is one more problem, which SiS seems capable of combating: very low average percentage of fit chips, which now hardly exceeds 50%. This is mostly explained by high level of chipset integration. All of them combine South and North Bridges in a single chip and many of them also feature an integrated graphics core. This is how SiS is planning to solve the mater:

• To manufacture chipsets made of two chips: South and North bridges;
• To increase the share of discrete chipsets (without integrated graphics) or with the disabled graphics core, i.e. those chips which were considered defective because of the invalid graphics core);
• To enhance the manufacturing technology.

We would also like to remind you that it could be quite beneficial for SiS to place orders for chipset manufacturing by other companies, though this is also quite problematic so far.
Anyway, no matter what course the events will take, the today’s chipset giants, Intel and VIA, will definitely have very tense times to live through.