Looking at the worldwide motherboard shipment performance in the first half of 2012, due to the fact that the first quarter is traditionally an off season for motherboards, coupled with shorter working days due to the Lunar New Year and subsequent labor shortage issues in China, the industry's full-system and barebone motherboard shipment volume witnessed a 6.4% sequential decline. However, as the recovery of HDD (Hard Disk Drive) plants in Thailand was better than expected and channel distributors, who used to build up inventories in the past, started to clear their inventories, the HDD supply and price resumed to normal levels thereby stimulating consumer demand for DIY computers. As a result, shipment volume of pure motherboards witnessed a 5.1% sequential growth in the first quarter of 2012. Overall, the worldwide shipment volume reached approximately 36.2 million units in the first quarter of 2012, inching up 0.6% compared to the fourth quarter of 2011. With the HDD supply becoming stable, system integrators, which used to concentrate their resources on high-end models in the past, increased share of mid-range and value-line models. In addition, motherboard vendors also started to lower prices for promotion in anticipation of the launch of Intel Ivy Bridge platform in the second quarter of 2012. Therefore motherboard ASP (Average Selling Price) slipped to US$43.9 in the first quarter of 2012, and the industry's shipment value reached approximately US$1.59 billion, down 0.6% compared to the fourth quarter of 2011.