Micro-Star International (MSI) last week announced that they had manufactured approximately 11.5 million of graphics cards in 2002, outperforming the main rival ASUSTeK Computer by more than six million units. Although MSI is probably not the world’s number one graphics card maker (for instance, PC Partner, who produces graphics cards for ATI Technologies and other vendors, makes up to 1.8 million of graphics solutions monthly, while MSI makes less than 1 million), MSI is definitely the biggest manufacturer of graphics cards based on the GPUs developed by NVIDIA.

MSI supplied about 4.60 million of graphics cards in 2001 and hardly more than 1.60 million in 2000, therefore we can only amaze with their pace of expanding the graphics cards business. In fact, we even know the reason of such rapid growth: MSI has been manufacturing graphics cards for the number two computer supplier in the world beginning from June 2001 and in August 2002 MSI landed a lot of orders on graphics cards from Dell (see this news-story). Moreover, being the main NVIDIA’s manufacturing partner, MSI can offer very attractive prices, hence, receive even more orders from both OEMs and retailers, especially from Europe, where price is a very important factor these days.

MSI also predicts over 20% growth in 2003 revenues and mainboard shipments. There are also no surprises here, as Dell Computer and HP had decided to choose MSI as an outsourcing partner for the year 2003 to make mainboards (see this news-story).

It is hard to predict how MSI will perform this year, as it is not clear which graphics chip supplier will sell more GPUs in 2003 and whose market share will be larger. Currently NVIDIA can hardly compete with ATI in terms of performance (see the story about performance of the GeForce FX) and in case the forthcoming NV31 and NV34 chips will not be able to beat the ATI’s RADEON 9500, 9500PRO and the upcoming RV350, there will be hard times for NVIDIA. In this case the demand on graphics cards with the VPUs from the Santa Clara, California-based developer will decrease and MSI will either have to find itself new customers in order to continue their expansion on the graphics card market, or start producing the products powered by ATI’s processors. In the latter case they are likely to lose discounts they receive from NVIDIA.