Where is Asetek going with its DIY channel?

If you are a part of this industry as an end user, partner or OEM you would be hard pressed to have missed that Asetek has been adding partners to our DIY lineup at a frequent rate. 2011 has seen new products from existing and new customers alike, including Antec, PNY, Corsair, Intel and AMD. I’d like to take some time and focus on this DIY market and leave OEM and servers out of the agenda (for now).

As you may recall, we launched the Hydro Series H50 with Corsair a couple of years back. At the time we were focused mainly on our OEM business, but from our “previous life” we had a solid amount of DIY end users who were clamoring for Asetek technology in their machines.

Strategically, we did not (and still do not) have a desire to build a retail channel and that was where Corsair came in to the picture. This partnership was a huge success that started with the Corsair H50. This partnership continues to prosper today as you can tell from the very recent launch of the H40 and H70 CORE.

We have received many questions (as well as more or less intelligent speculations in the press) as to why we dropped our exclusivity with Corsair as a partner. I am obviously not in a position to speak on behalf of others, but what I can say is that because of that big success we had to rethink our view on the DIY market. You don’t need an MBA to understand that having a significant portion of your revenues coming from only one customer is risky. 😉

As such, we decided to take a more risk adverse approach and establish a partner network, positioning ourselves as a technology provider like nVidia, for example. Our basic philosophy is to work with our partners in a way that they have their own identity, performance and feature sets and price structures. The big benefit for our ultimate DIY customers is more choice.

Another philosophy we have taken is to enable a group of global partners as well as a select group of regional partners in areas where our global partners’ outreach may not be great. This philosophy strives to ensure that Asetek liquid cooling is available to you no matter where in the world you might live.

We are continually adding to and trimming our partner network so expect to see even more great Asetek based products in a store near you!