14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that, while apparently doing well on the motherboard market, ASRock is not as well off on the notebook front, where it is supposedly considering a total withdrawal, as its efforts don't seem to be paying off.
End-users keeping track of such developments will have probably learned of how the motherboard market ended up at the end of 2010.
In terms of who sold the most motherboards, ASRock managed to snatch the fairly comfortable third spot.
While undoubtedly pleasant, this development seems to have been balanced out by the not so stellar performance on the mobile PC market.
According to a different report made by Digitimes, ASRock is considering gradual retreat from the notebook segment.
It was in March 2009 that ASRock revealed its notebook and nettop collection, which were mostly powered by Intel's Atom CPU.
It also made sure to have an entire business unit for this market and had as main targets the European and China markets.
The initial goal was to successfully distinguish its lineup from those of competitors, like its mainboards stood apart from those of ASUS for instance.
It mostly dealt in 12-inch and larger notebooks of US$400 to US$600, but first-tier vendors put up too strong a competition.
As such, even though notebooks sales accounted for 10% of ASRock's total revenues (the SFF PC business performed actually well), the outfit will gradually phase out from the notebook segment.
This may be looked upon as rather unfortunate, considering how both AMD and Intel have delivered new platforms for mobile PCs.
On the other hand, with laptop ,and especially netbook, sales expected to fall in the wake of rising tablet demand, a market that ASRock hasn't actually approached (not seriously anyway), the loss may not be too high.
Moving forward, ASRock will most likely concentrate on the small-form-factor PC and motherboard sides of its business.