Those companies who transfer their production facilities to China have to find use for their current plants located in Taiwan. Due to the fact that manufacturing mainboards in Taiwan is not very profitable anymore, DFI, for example, started to make applied computing platforms, while ABIT decided to use their existing lines in Taoyuan for producing niche devices like servers, routers or barebone computers. Most of the companies continue to use their present manufacturing lines in Taiwan for test purposes after transferring or outsourcing mass-production of their products to China mainland. As I have learned here, AOpen has gone even further: they decided to offer test-producing service to the others.

AOpen thinks that as long there are numerous companies who manufacture their devices in China, but whose R&D headquarters are located in Taiwan, they will have enough clients to use their new service. As stated by AOpen, currently the company contract-manufacturing products include motherboards, network cards and WLAN cards and some of their Taiwanese partners have already adopted the new offering.

I should point our that most of AOpen`s board products will be made in the company’s Zhongshan, Guangdong Province (China) plant and also in the base of its contract partner Wistron.

I do not think we should be somehow concerned about computer component makers moving their manufacturing facilities to China as is it the common practice in the industry these days. For example, ATI Technologies still have numerous SMT lines in Canada for manufacturing their testing-samples, but the boards can be found in stores are produced by PC-Partner then. TYAN also does not manufacture all their devices in the USA, but after thorough evaluation asks its Asian partners to make its products in volume.