ECS Elitegroup 2005 Editor’s Day

Final Thoughts

Nathan Kirsch’s Thoughts:

I can’t express what a good feeling it is to see one of the biggest motherboard makers in the world come to embrace the enthusiast community like ECS has. Far too often the big overseas companies forget the little guys by worrying about the bottom line and pricing only. I am a firm believer that having a good high end enthusiast part will only cause a waterfall effect on the other product lines and increase sales across the board. Examples of this can be found around the tech industry with numerous companies that built enthusiast only parts only to spin off a value line that was a success do to the company name. Starting from the top of the food chain and working down is the easiest possible way to enter into new markets, but not too many companies have this luxury. ECS is starting from the bottom of the food change and are trying to change their image from a company that produces “cheap” products into one that has parts that enthusiasts want.

We wondered why ECS would want to enter this new market and during the welcoming speech, CEO/President See See Lo was heard saying the words “Looking for Capital” during her take on the “new” ECS vision. A couple minutes later they talked about how ECS is a publicaly traded company and then it all came together in my head. Since ECS is a publicly traded company on the Taiwan stock market having increased cash flow or capital is something that will help boost the numbers on the quarterly reports. It is also common knowledge that enthusiast parts carry the largest markup and cost the most of nearly any hardware part one can buy. After looking up ECS on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (Stock Symbol 2331) it was noted that ECS is currently trading at the time of print at NT$19.80 or US$0.61. If you take the average stock price for 2005 and look at the stock history going back to 1994 one will quickly find out that the stock is at the lowest yearly average in their history on the TSE. After looking into this maybe we really know why ECS is picking now to move into the enthusiast community at this point in time.

When you look at other enthusiast motherboard companies right now a couple are having major internal issues, so there is a weakness in the food chain. A couple months ago rumors were flying around that ABIT was going to be bought out by ECS and although those rumors turned to be false ECS did admit they were considering it. In a private converstation ECS told Legit Reviews that they passed on buying ABIT because they did not want to deal with making boards under the ABIT name. In the end they have obviously come out with their own enthusiast product line dubbed the Extreme series and are going to build their own name rather than buy an existing enthusiast company.

ECS Elitegroup has an uphill battle to fight during the next twelve months, but if anyone can pull it off it is ECS. During the Editor’s Day I believe that ECS understands how picky and demanding the enthusiast community is. On behalf of Legit Reviews and our community we let them know that we will review and give in-depth feedback during the development of their “new” corporate image.

In closing we’d like to thank ECS USA for inviting Legit Reviews to discuss and help develop their future products and marketing plan.

Legit Bottom Line:

ECS Elitegroup is coming out with guns blazing and is aiming to enter enthusiast market and take a chuck out of the overall market share in one of the hardest fought industries in the world.