VIA Technologies has decided to raise the prices of its P4X266, P4X266E and P4M266 chipsets by nearly 10% on August 10, surprisingly defying the prevailing price-cut trend in the current market.
The new pricing will return VIA's Pentium 4-supporting chipsets to the US$15 level.
VIA's new strategy has made quite a stir in the motherboard industry. Board makers said it would indeed help assuage the heated price competition in the chipset market, but the company also will run the risk of opposition from clients.
However, VIA believed that the price increase will not bring much negative impact, as it does not apply to all its chipsets. In addition, it communicated with its clients in advance and offered them an adjustment period of nearly half a month.
Board makers said that for the moment VIA's latest chipset prices will not affect their purchasing costs much, since other chipset designers have not decided to follow suit. Manufacturers said that VIA is not the first chipset company to raise prices after launch. Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) had done the same for its PIII-based SiS620 chipsets. What the market finds more surprising is that VIA has chosen to raise prices while it is suffering from declining market share, industry sources said.
Affected by the decreasing market share of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and its own licensing dispute with Intel, VIA has not seen as strong chipset sales growth as before. In July, though the company's revenues rebounded after hitting bottom in June, the momentum came largely from processors and graphics chips.

Source: DigiTimes

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