Has it finally happened? :) According to some rumors from Taiwan, ASUS is going to enter the low-cost mainboards market. Of course, the company is not planning to involve its "expensive" name into the direct sales of cheap products: for this purpose they will establish a division in China called Hua Ching, which will be the one to start doing this business.

According to sources, Hua Ching will be led by Hsu Shih-Chang, chairman for ASUSTeK’s greater China operations and Wu Tsai-Teng, former vice president of the R&D division of PC Chips, will be assisting him.

I will not give any long commentary about it, as things are pretty much clear I believe: aiming at the High-End market the company has completely forgotten about the Value sector, where such companies as Elitegroup, MSI and Gigabyte have taken the initiative. Besides, the boundaries between expensive and cheap mainboard markets have been nearly erased lately, so that the "High-Endness" of ASUS products was reflected by a well-known brand name and incredibly high prices. Of course, this had its effect on the shipments: they hardly exceeded 82% of their initial plan for the year 2001 (see this news story).