Motherboard brand vendors are seeing demand from China's tier-4 to -6 cities growing rapidly and are turning to place their resources into these markets for 2015, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.
Since demand for PCs and home appliances from China's tier-1 to -3 cities has almost reached saturation and the China government has been aggressively promoting policies to boost demand from tier-4 to -6 cities, many vendors expect their sales to be primarily contributed by these markets in 2015, the sources noted.
Intel, AMD and Nvidia have already started cooperating with the related supply chain to enter these cities' PC DIY channels, the sources said.
Asustek Computer and Gigabyte Technology have been operating in these cities for many years and in addition to motherboards, they have also used their channels to help partners to distribute products such as processors, memory, chassis as well as notebooks and are even landing procurement orders from the local government and education units.
Since the costs for establishing channels in these cities are rather high, the sources believe second- and third-tier motherboard brand vendors are unlikely to be able to reach into the markets as deep as the top-2 vendors and therefore the competition will continue to favor Asustek and Gigabyte, the sources explained.
