by Anton Shilov
02/21/2003 | 12:37 PM
Taiwanese makers of graphics cards questioned by this Taiwanese web-site are still very conservative about their business expectations for the year 2003 and in general do not share NVIDIA’s optimism about rising market share of add-on graphics cards this year (see this news-story).
Companies like Micro Star International (MSI), Leadtek Research, Prolink Microsystems and CP Technology all said they expect minor of flat growth from 2002. All of them plan to focus on higher-end graphics cards in order to avoid competition with Intel’s integrated graphics cores. Therefore, all mentioned companies wait for their ASPs (ASP, average selling price) to increase, but the number of graphics products they sell to decrease this year. Leadtek and Prolink also told the journalists that they expect significant growth in their multimedia and communication products businesses. <%BANNER[article]%>
There are also those, who are a bit more optimistic about graphics business this year. Dandy Yeh, the chairman of Gigabyte Technology, predicted that the company will be able to ship 2.6 million graphics cards in 2003, with 50% of the shipments going to OEM clients (see this news-story for details about Gigabyte’s graphics card business expectations). Some small Taiwanese companies also said they want to expand the business units that deal with graphics cards because they had decided to produce more such products for Asian market. In addition, ECS plans to expand their add-in graphics cards business this year. This company definitely knows what it does, keeping in mind its excellent performance on the mainboard front. Maybe there are still a lot of growth opportunities for this market?