A half of the year passed, it is just the right time to report the financial results of the timeframe. The latter represent the current state of a company in the best possible way. Last week four Taiwanese mainboard-makers announced their finalised results for the first six month of the year 2002. It is a common trend nowadays that bigger companies sell more products and receive profit, while smaller manufacturers’ earnings are now very low. Since first-tier mainboard makers sell considerably more devices, even with current low gross margins, they still have money to invest in further development. The second-tier companies now can only survive, outsourcing the production to bigger manufacturers.

MSI managed to achieve approximately $756,87 million in revenue. Actual net income for the first half of this year was about $46,7 million. MSI’s gross margin reached 12.95% during the period. MSI manufactures mainboards and graphics cards for the world’s biggest computer suppliers like IBM, Gateway, Medion, Fujitsu-Siemens and Hewlett Packard, so, it is quite natural that the company constantly grows. MSI has already attained 56% of full-year target. What is important is the fact that currently the company has so many orders that they are unable to fulfil them. They now are going to add another SMT line in one of their Chinese plants and also tune the others in order to increase their monthly capacities.

Shuttle, who have a very broad product portfolio, from low-end mainboards to servers, was the most profitable company in terms of gross-margins that reached about 15.03%. For the first half of 2002, revenues increased to about $68,615 million and after-tax profits rose to $3.27 million. Shuttle also provides certain devices for some major PC vendors, but we should note that some of their products are made by ECS.

Chaintech is likely to report losses for the first half of this year as their revenues were $67 million, but gross-margins decreased to about 7.36%. From January to June Chaintech had to write off some inventory, invest in further development and finally lost some money on foreign currency exchanges. However, the company may still become profitable by the end of this year since presently they have so many orders that they even consider outsourcing part of the manufacturing to another makers.

Although DFI’s revenues only reached about $55.34 million, due to the fact that they were making some industrial computers and appliances, they managed to achieve 12.77% in gross margins. Their after-tax income was nearly $1.5 million.

Although some second-tier manufacturers had tough times in the beginning of this year, they are likely to improve their financial performance in the second half of 2002. However, this Fall another price war among mainboard makers may emerge as Intel updates its families of chipsets, in this case, some companies may not be able to declare significant profit for this year or even go out of business in the worst case.