14 DAY TRIAL // Coming from a strong position as the leading maker of high-end motherboards, graphics cards and gaming displays, ASUS is now considered the world’s top manufacturer of gaming laptops.
ASUS is currently a world-class manufacturer of PC hardware dedicated to desktop gaming, and at the moment the company is offering the best mainboard solutions for the Z170 chipset, both in desktop size and mini-ITX form factor.
However, the surprise came when the first figures revealing the amount of gaming laptops sold this year arrived. According to DigiTimes, Asustek shipped 40 per cent of the gaming notebooks with Nvidia GeForce GTX 950M, 960M, 970M and 980M graphics processors that were sold in the first half of 2015.
Quoting “sources in the supply chain,” the Taiwanese newspaper says that ASUS came first before the Lenovo Group and MSI (MicroStart International), which only covered 15% of the gaming notebook market during the same period. Acer, although it launched strong gaming laptops this year at IFA2015, only came on forth, with about 11% market share.
While its competitors do business in targeted markets, ASUS sells worldwide
The report is pretty slim in details and does not specify which laptops are dedicated to gaming and which belong to the more general class of powerful media mobile PCs.
Since mobile PCs usually integrate graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 950M and the GeForce GTX 960M, they are pretty close in performance to the former dedicated gaming machines that also feature higher-end solutions like GeForce GTX 970M/980M. For instance, the most powerful laptop Lenovo sells has an Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 860M GPU and is not considered a gaming laptop.
Apparently, the main reason behind this discrepancy in sales coverage between these Asian giants is the specific markets they sell their high-end laptops on. Lenovo is selling its powerful laptops mainly in China, while Acer and MSI in Europe. ASUS got the biggest selling numbers because it sells gaming laptops worldwide.