Motherboard brand vendor ASRock is set to achieve shipments of more than eight million units in 2013, up from 7.7 million units in 2012, and will maintain its gross margin as well as ASP, according to company COO Hsu Lung-luen.
ASRock was the third-largest motherboard brand worldwide in 2012, following Asustek Computer and Gigabyte Technology. Due to price competition, ASRock suffered drops in both profit and gross margin in 2012, but the company will continue to expand into the China market in 2013 to gain support from local distributors.
Hsu noted that Intel's action of quitting the branded motherboard industry will provide ASRock a good opportunity to expand its shipments in 2013. China will remain one of the company's major focuses for 2013 with shipments to the country expected to account for around 30% of the company's total shipments in 2013, up from 20% in 2012.
In addition to motherboard products, ASRock has also been aggressively entering the industrial PC (IPC) market, and although the company has not yet earned any profit from the business, it is still confident about achieving growth in the near future, Hsu noted.
The motherboard business currently accounts for 90% of ASRock's revenues, while its home theater PC (HTPC) business is at 5% and its server and embedded product business has the remaining 5%. ASRock's motherboards are outsourced to Hong Kong-based Fittec Electronics, which has 65% of is output from plants in China and 35% from Vietnam.
For the first half of 2013, Hsu expects ASRock's shipments in the first quarter to enjoy a slight growth of 5-10% sequentially, but to suffer a sequential drop of 10% in the second. Meanwhile, Hsu expects that the company's EPS to grow from NT$8-9 (US$0.27-0.3) in 2012 to above NT$9 in 2013 due to the launch of Intel's Haswell platform later in the year.
Commenting on rumors about Intel will giving up LGA packaging and adopting BGA packaging, Hsu pointed out that the plan is for mobile product lines, which need to be thinner, such as notebooks. The desktop market is unlikely to be affected at least before the end of 2015.
Seeing that many of its competitors have entered the tablet market, Hsu noted that competition in the tablet industry has already turned unbearable for players with no advantages and ASRock does not have plans to follow suit.
Article translated by Joseph Tsai
