ASUS, GIGABYTE, and MSI will be increasing retail pricing for its motherboards and graphics cards in China starting next month, right after the 2017 Lunar New Year holidays, according to sources of DigiTimes.
They reported: "The sources expect the motherboard players to raise their product prices by around 5%. Since demand for motherboards has not been strong for the past few years, maintaining sales with the price increases will be a major task for the players".
The same sources said that Intel's new Kaby Lake-capable 200 series motherboards and NVIDIA's latest GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards will be increased in price in China. DigiTimes continued: "Currently, NVIDIA's GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs are in shortage due to issues at an upstream foundry partner. Although NVIDIA tried to shift its orders to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), TSMC's fully loaded capacity is expected to prolong the shortages. As a result, NVIDIA has been adjusting its GPU supply to graphics card vendors recently and this has caused graphics card prices to rise".
China will have a very weakened market throughout the year in response to the increased price of new components, on top of analysts already expecting a 10% on-year drop in 2017 shipments.