by Anna Filatova
08/16/2002 | 11:37 PM
Well, in the computer industry sometimes you have to pay off with blood for certain decisions. A really good example is VIA Company, which is rapidly losing its chipset market share. After they had decided to start a battle with Intel about the Pentium 4 bus license, they lost all their positions as a manufacturer of solutions for Intel platform. And as the sales of AMD CPUs have also been going down lately, VIA got really close to losing the title of the Taiwanese leading chipset manufacturer.
In these conditions VIA simply has to look for new ways of earning money, which will push the company to diversify its business by moving from the chipset manufacturing to the production of other chips, which has been recently mentioned by the company CEO, Mr. Wen-Chi Chen. Now they are gaining about 85% of all their revenues from the chipset business, however, by the end of the year this number should drop down to 70%. A year later VIA is expected to be getting only 50% of the revenues from the chipset business.<%BANNER[article]%>
Speaking more precisely, we should point out that VIA is going to start shipping its new Savage XP graphics chip and increase the production of C3 CPUs and USB 2.0 VT6202 controllers.
Referring to VIA’s current business, which is not connected with the core logic manufacturing. In the end of August VIA will start mass production of Savage XP chip based on Zoetrope graphics core. This chip will be a kind of a pioneer pushing its way to the graphics accelerator market. Then, by the end of the year VIA is planning to launch the first samples of a faster Columbia solution, which mass production is scheduled for early 2003.
As for C3 processor, the launching of Eden platform in the end of 2001 alongside with the aggressive advertising and promotion campaign in June-July 2002 aroused really big interest towards it, so that VIA expects the sales of the C3 to grow up noticeably. Moreover, later on C3 will move to a new faster Nehemia core, which should also stimulate the growth of interest to this solution.
Also it is really good for the company that USB 2.0 is getting more and more popular. The VIA USB 2.0 controller appeared very successful, so that its sales make around 400-450 thousand chips per month now.
Later VIA will continue moving in all the above mentioned directions, which will very soon be more numerous, as the company is opening sound chip, communications business, SerialATA-controllers manufacturing, too. As a result, I wouldn’t exclude the possibility for VIA’s chipset business to move one step back later on.