Today Asustek and Gigabyte are the two largest motherboard vendors on the planet. Each of the company managed to sell eight million units during the first half of 2015, which is significantly less than what they've achieved in the same time frame last year.
It appears that the PC market was very weak in the first half of this year, which is actually something we can confirm by being in touch with a large number of vendors. The first half of 2015 was definitely one of the toughest in a long time, especially compared to 1H 2014, where the market was actually recovering.
According to a report from DigiTimes, ASUS and Gigabyte projected to sell 20 million motherboards each in 2015. Looking at the market today it's more likely that both vendors will sell roughly 18 million motherboards, which means they will miss their target by about 10 percent. Apparently the market has become tougher, especially for ASUS, which used to be the company selling the most motherboards for a rather long time. This in the end bears the consequence, that the competition between ASUS and Gigabyte has become fiercer and therefore also a price war has started.
A closer look at the sales number from MSI and ASRock shows, that these two companies were about to sell about two million motherboards during the first half this year. These numbers are also below the vendors expectations. Apart from that both vendors will not sell more than six million motherboards in 2015 each.
This year's August will be in important month for all motherboard makers. As Intel is launching their new Skylake processors and this chips does not have integrated voltage regulation it gives the motherboard vendors more possibilities to diversify regarding the power design. Apart from that all companies are pushing in the gaming sector, where as ASUS is even offering branded desktops. ASRock is also attacking in the server market, offering low-cost server and industrial motherboards. 2015 is definitely another tough year for the entire industry and it's actually tougher than everybody expected.
Source:
DigiTimes