ASRock, a Taiwan-based maker of motherboards for sale under the own brand ASRock, has set target shipments of 10 million motherboards for 2012, according to industry sources in Taiwan.

With shipments of 1.9 million motherboards in the fourth quarter, ASRock will ship 7.8 million units in 2011, 13.3% short of the goal of 9.0 million units and becoming the third largest among Taiwan-based vendors next to Asustek Computer and Gigabyte Technology, the sources indicated.

While the market segment of profitable high-end motherboards has been dominated by Asustek and Gigabyte in recent years, ASRock has emerged with lower prices but competitive product performance since 2011, the sources pointed out.

ASRock has recently launched Fatal1ty x79 Professional, a high-end gaming motherboard based on Intel X79 chipset and equipped with four DDR3-2400 DIMM sockets and 10 SATA ports to support 4-way SLI setups or CrossFireX, the sources indicated. In addition, ASRock has launched three Mini-ITX motherboard models, that is, AD2700-ITX/AD2700B-ITX and AD2500B-ITX equipped with Intel Cedar Trail Atom D2700 and D2500 processors respectively, the sources noted.

With motherboards accounting for 90% of its revenues, ASRock has the remaining 10% coming from HTPCs (home theater PCs) for sale at US$300-1,000, the sources indicated. In addition, ASRock has stepped into motherboards for use in servers in light of large market potential from cloud computing application, the sources pointed out.

Source:digitimes