A visit to ECS HQ
When prestigious international trade events take place, Team-HEXUS attends in force to bring the latest news to you, our dear readers. If that means flying all the way to Taiwan (to Computex, for example), so be it. The beauty of attending such events is that it presents a number of once-a-year opportunities... aside from the booze and partying, we mean.
See, when in Taiwan, you're in the heart of the industry. It's a country where a great number of company headquarters can be found, so when attending big trade events like Computex, it's not uncommon to be invited for a little look around a company's manufacturing facilities or offices.
Take ECS Elitegroup, who this year invited a select number of distributors and media to its ShenZhen motherboard manufacturing facility, where company representatives explained what ECS had achieved since it was founded in 1987, told us a little about its manufacturing lines and gave us a tour, of course.
A brief history
ECS is a Taiwanese company, founded some 19 years ago. It became listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in September 1994. In 1998, the company established a motherboard manufacturing plant on the Chinese mainland in ShenZhen. Come 2002, this had enabled it to product a mighty 2 million units every month. In the same year a notebook facility was established, also in ShenZhen.
In 2002, 2003 and 2004, ECS was in the top-100 best IT enterprises as published by Business Week in the USA. ECS is one of the largest motherboard manufacturers in the world, although if you've read up to here, that probably comes as no surprise.
Currently, ECS is building a new headquarters in Taipei - it'll be finished next year. The company's corporate aims are to maintain and strengthen its position as a provider of products for desktop and notebook PCs, along with driving forward personal computing with innovation and integration. ECS takes pride in its rapid progression from R&D through to sample creation and finally mass production of new products.
In the area of motherboards, ECS has three distinct product lines. Its 'regular' ECS motherboards are aimed at providing suitable platforms for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and system integrators (SIs) to work with. The Extreme series of boards are aimed at computing enthusiasts intent on building machines themselves . PC Chips completes the trio, a brand of cost-effective motherboards for small-scale system-building operations.
A manufacturing capacity of 2.5 million motherboards a month has given ECS Elitegroup a 15% slice of the pie that is the motherboard market.
