ASUStek and Asrock, same company?

It seems quite a few people think that Asrock is still a subsidiary of ASUStek. That is no longer the case since in July 2010 the company was spun off and Pegatron (100% owner of Asrock) is an independent company that is not ASUS but rather a competitor to ASUS. Since then Asrock has actually climbed above MSI and ECS to #3 in non-oem mb market share.

Pegatron is an OEM (whitebox manufacturer) and ASUS (and some other companies) outsource a lot of boards to Pegatron. ASUStek does however own minority shares in Pegatron (25%) and the two companies have some IP cross-licensed but the two are now independent.

This is my understanding of the situation anyway

Are you a member of tpu? There was a big thread on it there...

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151469&highlight=Asustek

Nope. Did they come to the same conclusion there?

IMO there are way too many common components including the chokes and caps that they most frequently use... That's all I'm informed enough to say.

ASRock used to be part of ASUS. They split off last year. The boards share similar designs because they actually worked together on those in design before the split. The engineers still employed at ASRock used to be ASRock's engineers within ASUS. Similarities are inevitable.

Page 19 of Pegatron's 2Q 2011 financial statement shows they have some long term stake in the relationship with their related companies, with between 15 and 50 Million of long term equity investments in Asus and related spin off companies. Later pages also show 50 Million worth of goods exchanged between Asustek and Pegatron in the first 6 months of 2011.

Companies can be considered separate, but in many ways all that really changes overnight is how they do the books. Over time more things may change, but just because they do their accounting differently does not mean they alter their supply chain overnight also. From the looks of it, the checks and balances have changed by spinning off Pegatron, however they are still the largest players on each of eachothers financial reports.

At a glance, it looks like 2 halves of the same company just keeping their accounting separate... Of course they have separate board of directors and chain of command internally.

I think the goods exchanged are the ASUS boards that Pegatron manufacturers.

I find it interesting now that Asrock has started to cater to higher end markets their sales have gone up a ton. Probably has something to do with the partnership with Jonathan Wendel (Fatal1ty). They also plan on increasing their mid to hi end boards from 20% to 30% of their business in 2011. Last year for sales went as follows:

ASUS - 21.6m boards
Gigabyte - 18m boards
Asrock - 8m
MSI - 7m
ECS - 7m

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