A vice president for Elitegroup Computer Systems, one of the top mainboard manufacturers on the planet, said in an interview that he expects around five mainboard companies to remain in the business in the course of the following years and that further consolidations were certain to happen.

When asked about how many companies would be in the mainboards market eventually, ECS vice president David Liu responded that perhaps less than five, maybe more. Though, it is possible that there are more brands on the market than actual companies, implying cases similar to Abit, which is produced by Universal Scientific; Asrock, which is a subsidiary of Asustek Computer and Gigabyte United, which is a joint-venture by Asus and Gigabyte.

“I think the number will eventually be five or six, maybe even less. I mean real big players, although the number of motherboard brands can be larger. Maybe up to 8-10 because some market segments can be better served by the same maker with a different brand, so this may help smaller makers survive as brand holders focused on engineering and design work, with manufacturing transferred over to a big player. This could be the way they can still make money, retaining their brands and lowering their operation expenses,” Mr. Liu said in an interview with DigiTimes web-site.

Despite of the fact that ECS is facing tremendous competition from Asrock and some other players and very hard period for ECS from 2002 to 2005, the company still considers the mainboard business “quite healthy”.

“The motherboard business is still quite healthy, basically, although many changes happened to the industry over the past several years. I mean not only technologies, such as CPUs or interface buses, but also the way to make boards, in other words - design routines,” Mr. Liu said.

In fact, unlike smaller players, believes that rapid technological development is good for the industry and itself.

“There are also many changes expected to come in the near future. New CPUs, new sockets, new chipsets, new memory types, new buses. […] Any change of this sort means an opportunity for motherboard makers to gain more market share, so I believe the future for motherboard makers is bright until, at least, 2010. Generally speaking, Intel and AMD, introducing new technologies and architecture solutions, will continue assigning many new tasks to the motherboard industry, unless they both have a system on chip,” said vice president of ECS.