MicroStar International Faces Conflict Between Brand and OEM Businesses

From X-bit Labs: The conflict of interests between own-brand and contract manufacturing businesses is not something new. Both brands and manufacturing assets become more and more valuable these days, hence, no surprise that companies try to ensure that nobody slowdowns their development.

MicroStar International, one of the world’s largest makers of mainboards and other components, said that it has faced a conflict between its own-brand and OEM businesses. The same kind of disagreements forced Asustek Computer to spin-off its contract manufacturing into a separate company and then essentially to sell off all manufacturing assets. However, MSI has no plans to follow the footsteps of its larger rival.

Henry Lu, vice president of MSI, said that OEM orders for notebook and graphics cards saw a serious drop in 2009 due to the concerns of customers about the rise of MSI's brand business, moreover, shipments are expected to drop further in 2010, reports DigiTimes web-site.

According to MSI, last year it shipped 18 million motherboards with 10 million own-brand products; 7 million graphics cards, including about 2.1 million of own-brand units; 2 million notebooks of which about 1.4 million were MSI-branded.

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