ATI stops introducing self-made desktop graphics cards in Taiwan and China

The move will open up the marketplaces for ATI’s card-manufacturing partners, such as Gigabyte Technology and CP Technology. For the European and North American markets, ATI will keep providing self-made graphics cards, but will arrange its shipments according to its manufacturing partners’ supply capacity. With the outsourcing efforts, the overall ratio of ATI-made products is estimated to drop further from below 50% currently to 20-30% by the end of this year.

Despite its withdrawal from the clone sector, ATI still holds quite a few OEM orders from brand-name PC vendors itself, which are also expected to be gradually released to its card production partners in the future.

Earlier, ATI’s operations in the OEM market had been questioned by some of its card-production clients, as the company, in an effort to aggressively boost its presence in the OEM market, has been fulfilling OEM orders itself with own-made cards, which still enjoy better technology and cost competitiveness.

In response, ATI stressed that it has not changed its plans in releasing card production to its partners. In fact, to fortify the sales of its card-manufacturing clients, ATI recently launched two new marketing policies, the Asia Pac Partner Program (APPP) and System Integrator Partner Program (SIPP), offering US$1-5 rebates to companies buying graphics cards from its production partners.