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Abit reportedly to phase out the market after Intel 4 series chipset launch

AshPhoenix

AshPhoenix

Member
Digitimes

Second-tier motherboard maker Abit is reportedly concidering phasing out of the motherboard market after evaluating its shipment performance of Intel 4 series motherboards, according to channel sources.

Abit, howerver, maintains it does not know anything about the speculation and will continue to develop motherboard products.

Abit's has failed to meet the expectations of parent company Universal Scientific Industrial (USI) in its ability to compete with fellow second-teir makers in terms of performance, or first-tier makers in terms of pricing in the mid-range and entry-level market, and so the company is evaluating whether to quit the market and start developing other products for the Abit brand, noted the sources.

In 2007, Abit shipped 2-3 million motherboards and had set a goal to ship six million units in 2008. However, the company's current shipments have actually decreased. Abit will determine whether to stay in the market after evaluating its shipments performance of P45-based motherboards, added the sources.
 
Bloody shame, but not altogether surprising when you consider that Abit had to sell their IP35-E for $60 (and the IP35 Pro for $140) to move significant volume. I doubt the profit margins were sizable. They're probably waiting to see how many of those rebates will actually be redeemed before they decide whether it's worth staying in this market.
 
I don't get it why P35 boards were so expensive at first place, it is not premium chipset with SLI or something.. must be that intel enjoyed C2D CPU & chipset monopoly and set price high on its chipset.
 
abit used to be the best... but they have been trying to profiteer too much by making low quality mobos (and low quality everything that went with it) that just werent worth it.

As for the price... you are dead on postmortemIA
 
I'll just copy & paste what I've posted elsewhere:

afaik the IP35 series has been a big success for them.
They've also just taken on a new UK sales manager.

The problem with rumours like this is that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies, that's what happened with abit last time before USI got involved. People held off buying mobos because of the rumours & that of course affected their income/cash flow & their ability to introduce new models> fewer new models>fewer people buying their board> etc. etc. - a vicious spiral.

Interestingly Fudzilla, The Inquirer & The Register haven't anything on this story & they tend to have their ear to the ground.

Tbh I think that the long term future of all the second tier manufacturers (abit, Biostar, DFI etc.) is under some doubt for mainstream mobos as Asus, ECS, Foxconn, Gigabyte & MSI (I even have doubts about MSI) are just in a different league in terms of volume & therefore economies of scale.
If they can't find a sizeable niche that they can call their own ...

& it appears to have been rebutted.
http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/...c&p=431742&postcount=1
 
I would have thought that at least one of the bigger motherboard manufacturers would buy out abit and it's name before it came to that point. DFI, btw, really seems like a tiny operation as far as the design team, from what I recall from a Hexus tour of the DFI offices a few years ago.

As far as MSI, they have various other ventures besides motherboards, do they not? Things like video cards and UMPCs (Wind laptop).
 
Meh, I have not touched an Abit board for a while now because quality issues. Too bad because that was all I used in all my builds.
 
& yet on another forum there is a small system builder who has used over 50 IP35s & not had 1 back (unlike some larger brands) ...
 
Does Abit make anything besides motherboards these days? I know they used to make video cards...

If not, then what's the point of Universal owning Abit if the mb business is being jettisoned? It seems best to sell the brand to someone else; perhaps an up-and-coming Chinese firm that wants to compete with Taiwan. It's the fastest way for a Chinese firm to acquire brand equity in the West (qv Lenovo = IBM personal computers).

Abit quality went back and forth, but I was under the impression that it had regained its footing under Universal. The Abit IP35-E and Pro both seemed very highly regarded in their segments...
 
I would imagine this is only just a rumor and I really hope it is not true. As many of you know the IP35-E has been very popular on this forum and for that reason I purchased one many months ago and it is still a great quality mobo for a VERY reasonable price. The big four (Asus, MSI, Giga, Foxconn) have been coming out with excellent budget and high end boards which seems to be putting the squeeze on the smaller brands like DFI, Biostar, Abit etc. It seems only inevitable that a few may soon have to go.
 
they are supposed to be getting back into nVidia gfx cards, they make a PCI-E wireless card (USI are big in wireless), some digital speakers & they are getting into Mobile Internet Devices, Point of Sale & a Digital Photo Frame Printer.
I think that there is some evidence of USI starting to try to leverage the abit brand into other areas but no doubt using USI's own abilities/strengths for product development.
 
?It?s not true; we?re just as committed to motherboards as ever,? said Welling. ?We improved our motherboard sales by 160 percent last year.

To further stress abit?s commitment, Welling said ?We will have 38 motherboards on display at Computex, 12 of which will be new. We will have a full range of Intel, NVIDIA and AMD boards, including the new, high-end, Intel P45 based IP45 Max.?

http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=13525
 
Want to sell more mobos? Easy, ship out IP-35E again. Drop that crap with 35P or 35V. It's a good fat-trimmed board focused on overclocking.
 
An 'IP45-E' should garner Abit plenty of sales, given a sub-$100 market price. Though, again, I'm not sure how worthwhile Abit's profit margins will be.

For Abit (and I suspect most P45 board manufacturers), the key thing will be to deliver qualite boards at considerably less than $200. If we're forced to spend a packet on P45, I'm more likely to simply wait for Nehalem. Whereas a P45 board at about $100 with cool northbridge, good overclocking, and support for cheap DDR2 might make an attractive upgrade for many Penryn owners.

If Nehalem is costly, rare, and difficult to overclock, the P45 will be the chipset of choice for the next six months or more, until Nehalem becomes affordable.
 
Jah, I was trying to give Nehalem the benefit of the doubt, ha! My realistic (pessimistic?) speculation is that very few of us will be using Nehalem before this time next year unless we get a good deal on a Dell, heh.

So if qualite P45 boards drop to prices we currently can obtain for P35s ($100 to 150), then I suspect most 'enthusiasts' will be overclocking Penryns on P45 boards in AD 2009, and not migrating in droves to Nehalem.

I hope AMD takes advantage of this opportunity, but I don't see anything on the horizon that suggests they will. Shanghai is just a 45nm evolution of Barcelona, so we'll probably see somewhat more efficient Phenoms, but nothing that will blow away today's Penryns. So if we're not happy with Nehalem in 2009, we'll probably be buying (even cheaper) Wolfdales and Yorkfields, not Shanghai.
 
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