The coming of the Chinese New Year makes Taiwanese manufacturers sum up what was done in the year 2000 and arrange their plans for the next year. We managed to find out some figures showing how many mainboards the leading manufacturers are going to sell next year. Take a look:

Manufacturer	Sales for 2000 (thousand units)	Sales for 2001 (thousand units)
ASUS	13,950	18,000
Gigabyte	9,800	13,000
MSI	9,000	12,000
ECS	7,600	9,880

As you can see from the table, the recently made forecasts stating that the PC sales will drop in 2001 do not frighten the mainboard manufacturers at all. All of them are planning to increase the production volumes. In fact, this is quite logical. More and more large OEMs have started ordering mainboards for their systems on Taiwanese manufacturers’ fabs lately. That is why the largest companies in this market, such as ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and ECS expect their sales to grow by about 30% on the average.
If we assume that these forecasts come true, the average mainboard cost should be getting down little by little next year, especially since most Taiwanese mainboard makers are planning to move the manufacturing to China, where the labour force is much cheaper than in Taiwan.