Taiwan's New Economy is Sink or Swim

pschmid

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Asus' recent acquisition of Gigabyte depicts the conversion of the IT business into a mature industry. Those who don't want to disappear need to expedite their business, because brand-building and nieche-crawling don't cut the mustard. Who is next on the list?
 

infornography42

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Think of HP, Dell or Gateway again: These heavyweights will only go for highest quality to not threaten their reputation by using lousy components.

BwaHAHAHAHAHA!

I think thats the funniest thing I'm going to read all day.

Too bad the sarcasm probably wasn't intended by the writer...

Dell I can kind of see belonging in that sentance... yeah they have had a few stink bombs, but overall their quality is very good.

HP and Gateway on the other hand regularly put out some of the lowest quality, most heat sensative, and poorly configured crap on the market.

Back when I was doing tech support for HP notebooks, about half of all their models had serious heat problems and there was all of jack squat that could be done about it.

Really, if those are the lofty heights of stability that these motherboard manufacturers are aspiring to we are going to be in real trouble.... good thing for us they have been more reliable than those brands for a good long while now.
 

odk0037

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Seriouly, couldn't agree more. Have the writer seen any Asus notebooks? They do cost more while HP, Dell, Gateway tend to be the budget choice.
 

DarkLord999

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Patrick, THG ain't a low-level blog and you know that. This should belong to TGDaily.

This is only a minute proportion of Taiwan's economy. The title of the article is offensive to my country and misleading.

Taiwan’s new economy isn’t new anymore and it is maturing. 10 years ago when Win95 first came out, how many major graphic chip makers were out there? Maxtor, Tseng lab, Cirrus Logic, 3dfx, just to name a few I could recall, have all been burried since. 10 years ago, a decent computer would have cost about NT$50K. The same computer will cost half as much today and that’s not counting inflation in this past decade.



I’m afraid Taiwan had missed the boat in this run. As good a company as Asus, Gigabyte is, not too many people outside of the enthusiasts would know about their existence after all these years. If you don’t think Intel cutting 10,000 jobs is a sign of things to come, you are in denial.

I’m an enthusiast myself but I find the computer gaming scene to be pretty dull after Win2K launched because you can get so much out of you money now that I don’t need to upgrade anymore. Unless you want 200 fps on insane resolution, your new rig should last 18-24 months while I used to upgrade every 6 months during the Win95/98 era.


And what kind of computer you’ll need if you just do some emailing and web browsing? A three year old rig you can get for $200 can do all that plus playing DVDs.

Out of all the companies, maybe only Acer has tried to build brand awareness but not to too much success. The rest are just happy to be the foundries of IT world producing the same products competing with their own countryman. How many different Nvidia 5900 cards, nforce4 mobos, etc. do we need out there?

Taiwan’s closest competitor, South Korea, on the other hand, has used this opportunity to propel themselves to a higher plateau. Samsung was barely a recognizable name but is now a leader in many areas, DRAM, LCD, DLP just to name a few.

Of the four DRAGONS, Hong Kong and Singapore will always have their finance and transportation sectors to count on, Korea has made great strides in building brand awareness, and Taiwan only has a maturing and dwindling IT business to fall back to. It’s hard not to worry about Taiwan’s future at this juncture because China is poised to overtake Taiwan’s position in this regard even if the market is healthy.

To use terms like a “minute propotion” or “offensive” just shows that you are very insecure to hear about the truth.
 

nanoprobs

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It just makes me wonder why does the P4S800-MX crap up so badly. If they have done all those stress testing and board testings. The batch that was distributed to N.Z last year (2005) around June and onwards has like 90% faulty rates. All brand new Boards out of the box, can't boot up at all, no power no nothing (fan doesn't spin either) , 9 out of 10 has this no power symptom. Other models beside this are all good though, it puzzles me how or whats wrong with those boards.
 

DarkLord999

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To use terms like a “minute propotion” or “offensive” just shows that you are very insecure to hear about the truth.
They're not 100% orientated toward eletronic researching anymore and you know nothing about the state in economic of my country.

Somehow, I knew you would say something like this. Mind you I'm from Formosa too, only immigrated to Canada 5 years ago. If an IT company like Asus is not gearing towards electornic researching, I wonder what they are doing now.
 

infornography42

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Honestly, I see this whole colsolidation thing as an inevitable and suprisingly long in coming evolution of the industry.

It would not surpise me if in 5 years we only have 3 major motherboard manufacturers to choose from. Actually I am surpised we don't have that already.

I expect Asus will be one of them, and I hope they are, but theres no telling how the market will shape up.

I have no idea how much of Taiwan's economy is tied up in the semiconductor business but it is a nontrivial amount. I also don't see it being in any particular risk of failing. They don't just do motherboards. In any given computer, a rather high percentage of the components soldered to things in it are manufactured in Taiwan. It would take an awful lot to change that.
 

mr_boogie

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It seems that the new trend in Taiwan (and don't forget that in the past there was a very family business scent in the industry here) is for mergers. You saw a lot of mergers last year, and the trend will continue. Companies cannot go on trying to kill everyone, because there is no more space for everyone. The IT market is completelly full, and the 2M Chinese companies that opened in the last years didn't help a single bit.

As far as I know (because I'm in the biz), more and more companies will soon disappear. Just look at the trends in the fairs. Every new Cebit or Computex brings a new flavour of small companies trying to survive, while the medium ones tend to disappear. Next I believe will be the memory market. I don't think that many of the players in the market will survive for long time. I foresee a lot of mergers or buys in the next years, as companies tend to have less and less margin. Just look at the new hike on the memory prices, and how the biggest guys did (stocking millions of USD of IC since June), and how the medium/small guys do. Even Kingston now seems to be playing up the brand card and is increasingly assembling Hynix memory on their modules (which is becoming a major problem for European companies, as they simply can't import Kingston).
 

mr_boogie

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there are so many players doing this biz that you don't even ever heard, that it is basically impossible to win real money on this. That is why many of the HK/CN factories that assemble VGA cards also have trading desks for cpu/memory, as otherwise they would have to close really quick