THERE’S NO DOUBT that Asus is getting ready to outsource more and more of its production now that the Pegatron spinoff has finally been set in stone. As of the end of last week, Asus and Pegatron are two entirely separate businesses trading on the Taiwanese stock market as separate businesses. As the two didn’t part as friends, it now looks like Asus is looking at outsourcing options for its motherboard and graphics card business and it seems like ECS is on the cards once again.
According to Digitimes it now appears that it’s a done deal that ECS will be taking over the manufacturing of not only motherboards, but also graphics cards from Pegatron, on behalf of Asus. This move was rumoured last December, although FIC was was also listed as a potential manufacturing partner. The partnership has yet to be confirmed by Asus, but there are only so many companies that could do that kind of manufacturing for Asus.
What does this means for the end users? Well, time will tell, but this kind of outsourcing generally doesn’t mean anything. That said if Asus were to decide to outsource product design, then things could very well end up changing quickly. ECS isn’t exactly a company known for offering great motherboard designs, although the general quality seems to have improved over the past couple of years. It’s too early to draw any kind of conclusions, but let’s hope things don’t turn out like it has for so many other companies that outsourced their motherboard business in the past.
Asus’ stock price went up by 6.89 percent in Taiwan during the first trade of the new shares to about US$7.41 per share. Pegatron’s shares were traded at a mere US$1.20 each, although that was up 8.19 percent from the initial list price.
Speaking of Pegatron, the company is rumoured to have scored a manufacturing deal for Acer desktop systems, although again, this has as yet to be verified by either company. Other potential clients for Pegatron includes Gigabyte if we’re to believe Digitimes, but this is yet another rumour that has been going around for some time and we don’t think it’s very likely that Gigabyte would consider Pegatron as a manufacturing partner considering its close involvement with ASRock.
For now it’s business as usual at Asus, but it looks like things will slowly change and it might not be a change for the better. As far as mainstream products are concerned, we doubt that a move to ECS would have any impact whatsoever, but we’re sure that many enthusiasts are concerned about this move. Hopefully Asus can put these concerns to rest by providing products that live up to the current levels of product quality. If not, this might prove to be a bad move for Asus motherboard and graphics card business units. Then again, if Asus truly wants to be the next Acer, then maybe we’ll see the components business unit being spun off further down the line.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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