Intel has decided to form an MA (Mobile Alliance) with Taiwanese Quanta, Compal, and Asus. The alliance will start operation in the first quarter of 2006. Intel will invest US$3 billion initially and the three Taiwanese companies will set up their own team to work with Intel's communications product group, supporting Intel's CPU distributors in product development and manufacturing and logistics. Intel will support every CPU distributor willing to participate in the project.

 

MA will aim at 30% to 40% of the current notebook PC market, and 60% to 70% of the potential notebook PC market. The partnership comes at a time when competitive pricing by the major PC brands continues to stall the growth of the notebook clone market; the brands are also adopting a larger share of AMD processors. With MA, Intel expects to boost the global clone notebook PC market five fold by 2007, pushing clone notebook PC share of the global notebook PC market to between 30% and 35%.