According to a Digitimes report ASUS and Gigabyte combined account for 60% of all motherboards shipped in China. The total market size for the Chinese “PC DIY” market is about 14.5 million motherboards for the first half of 2013 and of those ASUS managed 4.5 to 4.8 million while Gigabyte were slightly behind at 4 to 4.2 million. That said ASUS managed to increase their shipments from 4.4 million units in the same period the previous year while Gigabyte made a huge increase from 3 million in the same period last year.
MSI also made improvements rising from 800,000 units a year ago to 1-1.1 million this year. ASRock were up too shipping 920,000, up from 800,000 last year. Biostar saw their orders plummet from 1.3 million to 1-1.1 million while ECS shipped less than 200,000 units as they now mainly turn to OEM production. Other small brands in China such as Onda, Colorful, Maxsun and Yeston and Soyo all suffered year-on-year drops of around 25-60%.
While the Chinese market doesn’t reflect the global market per-sé, it does produce a reasonably accurate summary. It also shows us how well Gigabyte and ASUS are really doing and that MSI and ASRock are also doing very well, despite being much smaller. ECS, Biostar and other small/budget brands seem to be fading into the distance and just cannot compete with the big boys who seem to be consolidating their market share, particularly ASUS and Gigabyte.
Image courtesy of ASUS
Let’s just hope they can stay afloat… It’s always nice to have more options and better pricing competition