Motherboard makers aggressively jumping into Mini PC market

DigiTimes observes many of the leading motherboard makers are now aggressively targeting the mini PC market in an attempt to stop desktop sales from declining further. The site says Gigabyte and ECS, both early adopters of the Intel NUC platform, have seen better-than-anticipated sales on these products. Mini PCs enjoy high gross margins and the good demand for these products is pushing firms like ASUS, MSI, ASRock and Zotac to raise their shares in the market.

The first-generation NUC models did not achieve good sales because of their high prices, but demand for the products started picking up in 2014 as Intel and motherboard players reduced costs to make them price-friendlier to consumers.

Thanks to consumers' strong demand for small-form-factor desktops, Gigabyte's Brix and ECS's Liva series shipments both outperformed the two players' expectations and have also become a new profit contributor of the two.

For the Brix series, Gigabyte has been aggressively promoting the product line's performance and quality and the promotions have successfully helped the vendor achieve extraordinary shipment performance in Europe and North America. The vendor is seeing over 20% gross margins from the product line.