14 DAY TRIAL // There seems to be a rather unfortunate trend going on in the IT field, that of steadily growing prices, and it is motherboards that are taking their turn at it.
Motherboards are one of the two essential components of any computer (the other being the CPU), but they are about to give prospective buyers a reason to be rather despondent.
According to what Digitimes most recently had to say on the matter, the prices of mainboards in general will increase by roughly 10% by the end of the first quarter.
That means the end of March, 2012, which is not as far off as some would like.
This phenomenon is fairly similar to the one that took place around the same time last year.
Back in early 2011, motherboard prices went up by 5 to 10 percent because of rising material costs.
It didn't help that the factories tasked with producing the hardware suffered from labor shortages.
Then came the earthquake that hit Japan and, in addition to thousands of deaths, caused so much disruption to the worldwide market that component prices went up again, this time by 3-8 percent.
Motherboard prices are again going up because of the labor costs in China and the increase of the international price of copper.
Nevertheless, makers of motherboards expect to sell more products in the first quarter of 2012 than they did in Q4, 2011.
To give a couple of examples, ASUS hopes to sell about 10% more platforms, while Gigabyte has its sights set higher, on 20%.
The motherboard market is going through a somewhat milder case of what happened to the HDD market in late 2011.
With floods in Thailand affecting many hard disk factories, hard drive unit prices jumped by 10% to, in some extreme cases, 200% (this, ironically, helped Seagate immensely).
The prices are slowly going back down, but the shortage will last throughout most of the year.