Where did all the 939 boards go? continued

We have distributors, companies who import goods into each country and resell them. In the AMD heydays, those distributors that imported brands like DFI, Gigabyte and ASUS were going great guns - 939 boards were selling hand over fist - and they could not see AMD going anywhere but up. When AM2 was released, huge quantities of AM2 boards were imported based on the fact 939 systems were selling 500-, 1000- and more units a week. Distributors understand that there is a transition period, so they ordered a few hundred boards via air in order to get them within a week, and then proceeded to order a larger quantity to come in by sea; maybe 1000-units, maybe 3000-units. Based on our conversations with Aussie distributors, coming to Australia, a sea shipment is going to take about 6 weeks from Taiwan or China, by which time the distributor feels comfortable that people will be phasing out 939, and AM2 should really be beginning to pump along with their sales figures.

As week 6 draws closer, however, things are not looking quite right and a large number of AM2 boards from the air shipment are still sitting in warehouses gathering dust. Oh no.

Now picture you are a supplier. You have 3000+ AM2 boards across a broad range of models starting at AU$80 and going to AU$300 but consumers aren’t showing any interest in them. They want 939 boards; do you turn around and order up 939 boards? Well in happy fairyland, yes, but in the real world you do not, you try your hardest to push those AM2 boards - starting by dropping your margin, followed by selling at cost, and then in a plea of desperation, selling them below cost, just to get rid of them.

This was the picture for importers of AM2 boards from our research and discussion with people inside the industry here down under. With the huge number of boards in the country, you would have thought that AM2 stood to get a crack at the market, even if it was only short. It never got off the ground though, and by the time the boards finally sold companies felt so burnt by AMD that even when people wanted 939, no one was going to import more boards. Compared to the number of enquires they had on AMD in the past, what was getting asked now, was so small, that it was not worth the time and effort.