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"Riding on the wings of the golden era of Taiwan's motherboard industry, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) saw its share price soar to over NT$200 by the beginning of 2002, while the company's revenues continued climbing until peaking in November 2002. However, the period between 2003-2005 was a really hard time for ECS, as the company suffered on-year revenue losses for 22 consecutive months. The decline was painful, but now, allied with Tatung, the company is trying to rise back from its ashes like a Phoenix. In addition, with the industry seeing consolidation, ECS is not facing the challenges it saw previously."
Q: What do you think about the current situation in the motherboard industry as a whole? Is it alive and healthy? Is it growing? Is this business profitable now?
A: The motherboard business is still quite healthy, basically, although many changes happened to the industry over the past several years. I mean not only technologies, such as CPUs or interface buses, but also the way to make boards, in other words - design routines. There are also many changes expected to come in the near future. New CPUs, new sockets, new chipsets, new memory types, new buses. For example, AMD will soon have a new socket called AM2+, and then, it will introduce the AM3 socket for quad-core processors supporting DDR3 memory. On the other hand, Intel said it will a have a serial-bus architecture in 2008. Any change of this sort means an opportunity for motherboard makers to gain more market share, so I believe the future for motherboard makers is bright until, at least, 2010. Generally speaking, Intel and AMD, introducing new technologies and architecture solutions, will continue assigning many new tasks to the motherboard industry, unless they both have a system on chip."
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