sales of motherboards, PCs, chips and other systems are falling very strongly
Last year for manufacturers of electronic systems and devices turned out to be unsuccessful. According to analysts’ data, the supply of motherboards fell very seriously. The fall affected all major companies, including Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock. The total volume of deliveries in the global market decreased by 10 million boards per year. Details are under the cut.
Updates don’t help
In 2022, a lot of interesting new boards and chips for them were introduced. But even enthusiasts have so far refrained from buying, preferring to keep their own. Of course, the network is full of reviews and videos of new products, but most systems are available to reviewers for free or at a significant discount. But the usual buyer is not yet active. The reason is simple – in the current situation, many prefer to save money by refraining from purchasing “fresh”.
Here are the results of sales of the “Big Four” of their products.
Gigabyte was the least affected by the drop in board sales, while MSI and ASRock suffered the most. At the same time, over the past couple of years, MSI has significantly improved product quality, brand influence and customer loyalty to it. But all this did not help sales very much – a drop of 42% is obvious.
Most of the results provided by analysts in 2022 are worse than in 2018 (although then, however, there was no data on the shipment of motherboards by MSI).
There is nothing to be surprised – sales of laptops and PCs fell by 19% in a year
The problems in this industry are really very big. They affected both desktop PC vendors and companies that make laptops, mini-PCs, and so on. It is worth recalling that for the 4th quarter of 2022, sales fell by 28%.
According to both IDC and Gartner, PC sales for the year fell by about 19%, this is an extremely low figure. One of the main reasons for the fall is that stocks of unsold devices in manufacturers’ warehouses continue to grow. The latter counted on the fact that sales would grow, with an eye on the results of previous years and months.
All these expectations were not met. Moreover, the reality is much worse than vendors and other market participants could imagine until quite recently.
Chips are unwilling to buy
The average revenue of chip manufacturers in the market fell by 10% in 2022. In general, nothing surprising, since all the problems discussed in the article are interconnected.
The demand for PCs and laptops is falling, and accordingly, the need for manufacturers of these devices in processors, video cards, and memory chips is decreasing. Well, since a large number of stocks have accumulated in the warehouses of manufacturers over the long months of “semiconductor hunger”, demand will not grow soon. Now suppliers are already trying to free up warehouses, reducing prices for products.
The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that most companies that previously devoted large resources to the development of production have now begun to cut their budgets, reducing costs. Someone is lowering prices, because the warehouses of some companies are literally clogged with goods produced but not sold. The longer it lies, the less likely it is to sell anything at all. Therefore, companies are already launching discount programs and all that.
And smartphones too — the worst drop in 10 years
Analysts from the agency IDC recently considered that the fall in smartphone sales is the worst in a decade. IDC considers the announcement of the first iPhone model from Apple and the release of this device in 2007 as the date of the appearance of the market for such devices. So, according to the agency, in the fourth quarter of 2022, vendors shipped about 300 million smartphones. This is a lot, but when compared with the same period in 2021, the drop is very significant – 18.3%. Not a joke to say the least.
If we take the whole year, and not just the fourth quarter, then the drop here is not so strong, but still noticeable – 11.3%. In total, in 2022, vendors shipped 1.2 billion smart phones. All this gives analysts a reason to say that the final results of shipments of smartphones in 2022 are the lowest in the last 10 years. Perhaps, experts say, there is still room for growth. But it is insignificant, in addition, in the most optimistic forecasts, the positive dynamics does not exceed 2-3%.
To make matters worse, Q4 smartphone sales usually go up, not down. After all, this is the period of holidays, which means that smartphones, TVs, laptops and other equipment are massively bought. And it has always been so – until 2022, which became an exception to the rule.
Some think tanks are hoping that 2023 will be a turning point; the situation will gradually improve. Large businesses will begin to update their equipment parks, PCs and laptops of ordinary users will become obsolete physically and morally. In general, there may indeed be an improvement, but not too significant. After all, do not forget that companies are used to huge sales volumes and, accordingly, super profits during a pandemic.
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Then people and companies really needed equipment, and they bought it en masse. Hence the shortage of chips, resources for their production, etc. Now there is no longer such a large-scale need for hardware, so sales are falling, reaching, so to speak, a “normalization plateau”.
