Abstract

Although the scale of the motherboard exhibition this year was larger than that of other computing offerings, it is clear that the number of showcased motherboard offerings and their share of the whole exhibition were much lower than in previous years. Reasons for this are the fact that only the dual-core CPUs and GPUs were conspicuous new offerings, and the fact that overall the extent of changes in product standards was less complex than last year.

Moreover, demand in emerging markets is gradually growing and in those markets demand for change in product specifications is not as varied as it is in mature markets. Adding to this was the fact that motherboard makers did not focus on motherboard volume, but shifted their attention to increasing the share of notebooks, SFF barebones and other consumer electronics offerings, with the purpose of providing overseas customers with more choices besides motherboards. This reflects the results of makers' pursuit of a one-stop-shopping model.

Notebook makers in the past competed with low prices, and a high degree of uniformity has caused profit rates to suffer. During this year's Computex, makers not only followed the structure of orders by large makers, but at the same time also tried new functions and applications, with some of them looking to become quite essential. There is considerable room to further develop these next-generation functions and applications to capture the next wave of opportunities and reach higher levels of profit.

As the mass proliferation of desktop PCs peaks, market growth has been slow. To maintain some form of demand, makers have to develop offerings which stand out from the pack. As makers are confronted with the new gaming part of the market, which is not a part with which they are familiar, some are exploring this niche. Makers are still unceasingly trying to gauge the market acceptance for their wide variety of models, and therefore Computex was filled with many sorts of offerings.

Orders for CE-like EPCs have seen a clear increase in comparison with last year, as the digital home concept has picked up momentum in the last few years. Many PC and consumer electronics businesses are planning to make a big push in the fourth quarter, the traditional peak season, in order to materialize the good prospects of the digital home concept. Other PCs with diverse industrial designs are also slowly attracting consumer attention, and makers have had success in developing a more varied range of offerings. However, makers should be aware of the fact that presently sales numbers are not very high. Because of this, PC makers who are entering the consumer market should continue selling traditional tower and rack-mounted models in order to support the development of non-mainstream offerings.

Server makers are being confronted with product standardization and shrinking margins of the ODM/OEM model. Because of this they have begun to use smaller and more high-end offerings to enter the niche market, in order to increase profit margins, which have been continuously shrinking. However, there are not many customers which can be targeted for these offerings, whereas there are many competing makers. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether this market will again fall into pricing wars and whether it will be able to enlarge the receptivity of the original market.