Helped by its various chipset product lines and leading position in the processor sector, the chip giant's share growth indicated that Taiwanese chipset designers, such as VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) and ALi Corporation (formerly Acer Laboratories), are now facing fiercer competition among themselves in a much smaller arena.
During their heyday in 2001, Taiwan's chipset design houses claimed nearly 60% of the global chipset market with VIA posting a market share of as high as 48% along with share figures held by SiS and ALi.
However, in the second quarter of 2002, VIA, still under the cloud of the Pentium 4 technology licensing dispute with Intel, saw its share plummet to 22%. Meanwhile, though SiS enjoyed a marginal share growth of 1.5 percentage points quarter-on-quarter, thanks to its increasing P4 chipset shipments and improving yield rate, the growth did little to maintain the overall market presence of Taiwan players.
Currently, integrated products like the SiS650 series account for a large portion of SiS's chipset shipments. Due to higher costs and poorer yield rates of the integrated chipsets, SiS will not necessarily benefit from the growing shipments, especially as the products are not priced much higher than the discrete chipsets.
For Taiwanese chipset companies, pressure from Intel will only keep escalating. Besides its discrete products, Intel is sweeping the market and receiving a warm welcome from OEM vendors, with integrated chipsets launched in the second quarter. The climbing shipments of the integrated products are expected to affect not only the chipset market but also the graphics chip sector.
Source: DigiTimes