Hon Hai Develops Foxconn-branded Graphic-card Biz

Taipei, June 19, 2006 (CENS)--Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co. Ltd., the world's largest maker of barebone PCs, connectors, and game consoles as well as Taiwan's largest private manufacturer, recently claimed that it would venture into the graphic-card market with its own-brand Foxconn, in addition to maintaining its role as a major contract supplier to many big international brands.

Hon Hai claimed that it would cooperate with Nvidia, a leading graphic-card chip supplier, to develop own-brand graphic-card business.

At the just-ended Computex Taipei 2006 computer show, Hon Hai demonstrated its C51XEM2AA series card products equipped with Nvidia ForceR500 series media communication processors. As the series cards adopt AMD processor-compatible solutions, industry sources said that Ho Hai (already winning Dell's contract order for AMD-processor PC models) is enjoying an increasingly close tie with Dell.

At the CeBIT computer show held in March in Hanover, Germany, Hon Hai announced that it would increase a new graphic-card production line and would seek cooperation ties with Nvidia and Ati.

Some motherboard makers analyzed that Hon Hai's entry into the graphic-card market would impact the current market environment and reshuffle the list of leading brands in the line. Hon Hai is expected to generate a great pressure on some major local counterparts in graphic-card business, including Asustek Computer Inc. (Asus), Micro-Star International Co. (MSI), Giga-Byte Technology Co., Ltd. (Gigabyte) etc.

With an unmatched advantage of vertical integration, Hon Hai defeated strong rival Flextronics to become the world's largest EMS (electronics manufacturing services) provider in 2004, and launched Foxconn-branded motherboard products a few years ago to compete with the world's No. 1 motherboard marker Asustek.

Industry sources said that in order to compete face-to-face with major international contract customers, Hon Hai chose to develop Foxconn-branded products such as computer housings, cooling fans, optical-disc drives, and graphic cards, etc.