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VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems and ALi Corp., three computer chipset designers from Taiwan, keep on competing with Intel Corp. in the market segment, however, all three face declines in sales, as Intel continues to offer cost-effective products in addition to more advanced core-logic sets.

VIA’s sales in August saw an increase over July’s figure, though, the company’s inability to supply products supporting PCI Express interconnection presumably drove sales down in September. VIA’s net sales for August 2004 were approximately $56.55 million, a 6.04% increase over July’s figure of about $53.33 million and also a 7.38% upturn compared to August 2003. The company did not maintain the trend of increasing sales of the last few months and only recorded $55.44 million in revenue for September, 2004, a 2.17% decrease over August’s figure and also an 8.19% decrease over September, 2003.

Silicon Integrated Systems’ sales have also been decreasing year-on-year for months now, though, in August, 2004, the company posted an 18.3% sequential uptick in revenues to approximately 27.92 million from July’s 23.6 million. Still, even in August the company’s sales were down 30% compared to the figure for the same period last year.

ALi Corp., who has been concentrating on “alternative” chips and controllers, gradually withdrawing from the chipset business, also managed to saw sales upticks in Q1 2004, while later during the year the company’s sales were unstable. The reasons behind ALi’s sales decline are a bit different from those that back SiS’ and VIA’s failures.

Neither VIA nor SiS currently supply high-end chipsets for Intel Pentium 4 processors, except those unveiled last year. Though, VIA ships competitive core-logic products for AMD64 platforms. Meanwhile customers have been switching to Intel platforms during the most-recent years, which caused Intel’s chipset business to prosper, while VIA and SiS had to tighten their belts.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset...005151721.html

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