by Anton Shilov
08/30/2002 | 10:18 AM
Economical situation as well as floods in Europe weakened the demand on mainboards and graphics cards on the retail and clone markets in August. It mostly affected second-tier computer component makers, since the first-tier companies always have a lot of OEM orders that help them to stay up and running.
Presently, ASUS, ECS, Gigabyte and MSI report that their mainboard sales are going to grow 10% in August compared to July. Second-tier companies are still tight-lipped about their results and it is estimated that those who are mostly concentrated on retail and clone market segments will announce a slight decline compared to July, while those, who have OEM orders may even report growth.<%BANNER[article]%>
Not very large second-tier graphics cards makers indicated that their shipments started to decrease in the second half of this year. As it was reported back in June, mainboard producers started to rise up the volumes of the i845G mainboards, causing the demand on low-end graphics cards to slide down. In September there will be even more integrated core-logic solutions on the market as Intel launches its new chipsets for Socket 478 platform, while NVIDIA rolls-out its nForce2 for Socket A maiboards. Moreover, both Sony and Microsoft declined their prices on PlayStation2 and XBOX consoles this Summer, as a result the demand on mainstream computers for gamers will also decrease a bit.
According to Leadtek Research and CP Technology, their August sales will be lower than in July, possibly due to the reasons stated above. CP Technology already noted that since Intel’s market share on the graphics solutions market is going to rise in the course of the next 2 or 3 years, the demand on low- and middle-range graphics cards will go down. Hence, the only chance for the companies that want to concentrate on their graphics business only is to offer high-end solutions and winning OEM orders.