ASUS Company

Origin of the name

ASUS was founded in 1989 in Taiwan by TH Tung, Ted Hsu, Wayne Hsieh and MT Liao - all four were computer engineers from Acer. The current CEO and Chairman of ASUS, Jonney Shih, joined the company in 1994. According to the ASUS sales manager Alexander Kim the name ASUS originated from Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. The first three letters of the word were dropped to give the resulting name a high position in alphabetical listings.

In 2004, ASUS was reported to sell more motherboards than three other leading companies combined, reaching 30 million. This number, however, includes rebranding contracts.

In 2005, shipments from ASUS, ECS, Gigabyte, and MSI totaled 104.86 million units. ASUS led with about 52 million units, followed by ECS with 20 million, MSI with 18 million and Gigabyte with 16.6 million. MSI revised its motherboard shipments from an estimate of 16.7 million units to 18 million, according to the company.

ASUS also produces components for other corporations, including Sony (PlayStation 2), Apple Computer (iPod, iPod Shuffle, MacBook), Alienware, Falcon Northwest, HP and Compaq.

Relationship with Intel

In the early 1990s, Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers had not yet established their leading positions in the computer-hardware business. Any new Intel processors would have been supplied to better established companies like IBM first[citation needed], and the Taiwanese companies would be forced to wait for approximately six months after IBM received their engineering prototypes.

When the Intel 486 first came out, the four ASUS founders decided to design their own 486 motherboard without having a 486 processor prototype on site, using only the technical details published by Intel and the experience they gained while making the 386 motherboards. When ASUS finalized their 486 motherboard prototype, they took it to Intel's base in Taiwan for testing. Unsurprisingly, they were not formally greeted when they arrived.

It turned out that Intel's own 486 motherboard prototype had recently malfunctioned, and Intel's engineers were still working on the solution. The ASUS founders exercised their experience with the 486 and had a look at Intel's malfunctioning motherboard. Their solution worked, to the Intel engineers' surprise. Intel then tested the ASUS prototype, which functioned perfectly. This marked the beginning of an informal relationship between the two companies - ASUS now receives Intel engineering samples ahead of its competitors.

Timeline

* September/October 2003: debuts in the cellphone market with the J100 model.

* September 2005: releases their first PhysX accelerator card (currently expected in May 2006)

* December 2005: enters the LCD TV market with the TLW32001 model, initially only available on the Taiwan market.

* March 9, 2006: ASUS is announced to be one of the producers of the first Microsoft Origami models, together with Samsung and Founder. Samsung and ASUS devices expected by April 2006.

* August 8, 2006: announced joint venture with Gigabyte Technology

Copyright 2008 - France BtoB from Wikipédia