The total market for NICs is estimated to be Rs 82.94 crore in 2000-01. The market declined by about 11 percent from the previous years’ sales. This was on account of slackening sales of NICs in the last two quarters of the fiscal. The year 2000-01 ended with sales of an estimated 1,048,000 NIC units, compared to last year’s 1,098,000. The average price of an Ethernet NIC, which forms the bulk of NICs sales, remained for Rs 500.

The clear leader was D-Link who sold 380,000 units with total revenue of Rs 39 crore and an overall market share of 47 percent. But, the players that made a mark during last year were Intel and Dax. Intel cut into the other’s market share gaining more than 4 percent to end the year with 15 percent of the market. And, Dax came out of the blue to capture 9 percent of the market. While all this was happening, 3Com decided to move away from the mass-market range of products to focus on manageability and feature-rich range. A battle between Intel and 3Com raged in this high range Fast Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet NIC market, where the average price of a card was over Rs 2,500.

The other visible players in this market were Allied Telesyn, Accton and Linksys.