14 DAY TRIAL // The series of earthquakes that hit Japan earlier this month has sent a shock wave through the whole computer industry, and these will contribute to the second motherboard price increase that we will see this year, according to sources from major motherboard players.
This will happen since the earthquakes have damaged the production facilities of several high-profile upstream component makers, which provided many of the parts used for manufacturing motherboards.
In addition, the crisis of Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant and the country's power brownout policy will further affect the component production, so the upstream supply chain is expected to suffer from a serious shortage, according to a DigiTimes Report.
Eventually, this will cause rising component prices in the downstream IT industry which will affect prices in the retail channel.
According to the sources cited by DigiTimes, some of the motherboard makers have already witnessed raw materials and components price fluctuations and these increases should become even more apparent starting with April when parts stocks are expected to decrease.
As a result, motherboard prices will increase with between 3 to 8% starting with May, but these will be adjusted each month according to the manufacturing costs of the boards.
This is the second time in 2011 when motherboards prices increase and the first price surge was caused by shortages of labor in China and rising raw material costs which forced manufacturers such as Asus and Gigabyte to increase their product prices by about 5-10%.
Fortunately, back then, the global PC demand wasn't affected as the prices of other key computer components dropped.
However, we may not be so lucky this time as the expected materials price surges will most definitely affect other PC hardware components such as CPUs and graphics cards.