14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Micro-Star International seemed to be doing fine from the outside, having launched quite a few products over the past few days, such as a gaming notebook and a custom HD 5870, not all seems well behind closed doors. It seems that MSI's success with its own-branded business has led to a serious decline in the amount of OEM orders it has received over the past year. This decrease in shipments is poised to continue during 2010, which may prompt MSI to become a fully branded vendor.
Digitmes reports that the company shipped under two million notebooks in 2009. This performance fell under the company's early estimates, but it was interesting to note that 70% of all these sales were own-brand-based. More specifically, the company shipped about 18 million in total, with ten million being own-brand products. This, of course, shows a significant growth in MSI's brand business. However, this success raised concerns in OEMs, which placed fewer orders and will likely continue to decrease the amount over 2010 as well.
In order to make up for this decrease in client-placed orders, MSI will work aggressively towards becoming a fully branded vendor. The report also states that the company has no plans to spin off its brand and OEM business within the next three years, as this would not benefit the company because of the limitations of economic scale.
MSI managed to score profits in 2009 not because of its laptop shipments, which might have actually hindered it, but thanks to the strong sales of motherboards. As such, the company is quite confident in its brand reputation and technology and aims to perform well in this segment in 2010. As far as its rivals are concerned, MSI Vice President Henry Lu supposedly stated that the predicted figures of Gigabyte, ASRock and ASUS were quite a bit higher than Intel's CPU shipments, which would suggest that some vendors may be producing extra motherboards to boost their numbers.