News Sales of Motherboards Expected to Drop by 30% in 2022

[Admin]

Motherboard makers review 2022 prospects as client PC market weakens.

Sales of Motherboards Expected to Drop by 30% in 2022 : Read more

 

[InvalidError]

A 30% drop would be in line with my expectations of PC sales returning to its historic downward trend after the huge COVID bump: take away the ~15% bump from COVID, add two years of pre-covid 6%/year decline, you get a ~27% total drop if nothing happens to backfill demand.

 

[2Be_or_Not2Be]

"Taiwanese companies that supply premium motherboards and graphics cards will suffer considerably more. "

I'm not sure I agree with the writer here. The manufacturers made substantial profits off GPUs & the overall demand for PCs/laptops as work-from-home & crypto-mining took off. That money is in their pockets now. So how exactly are the mfgs suffering if they simply produce less boards now? They aren't going to make the same big profits as a year ago (nor, I'm sure, do they expect to), but they definitely aren't suffering "considerably more."

 

[InvalidError]

So how exactly are the mfgs suffering if they simply produce less boards now?

If they expanded manufacturing capacity to partially catch up with surge demand, demand returning to its pre-COVID downward trend would hurt: you now have 10-20% extra manufacturing capacity going under-used over the 10-20% spare they may already have had to help ramp up new product output, accommodate seasonal surges, special orders, shifting production between lines for maintenance and other downtime, etc..

 

[2Be_or_Not2Be]

If they expanded manufacturing capacity to partially catch up with surge demand, demand returning to its pre-COVID downward trend would hurt: you now have 10-20% extra manufacturing capacity going under-used over the 10-20% spare they may already have had to help ramp up new product output, accommodate seasonal surges, special orders, shifting production between lines for maintenance and other downtime, etc..

Yeah, that would make sense. However, I don't think any of them increased capacity, largely in part because they couldn't get enough raw supplies to even support an expansion. I think they just took their profits with the big demand & never increased capacity. Indeed, most were/are still struggling to get back to capacity of pre-pandemic times, much less the continued strained supply.

 

[InvalidError]

Yeah, that would make sense. However, I don't think any of them increased capacity, largely in part because they couldn't get enough raw supplies to even support an expansion.

Many companies invested in new manufacturing outside China and Taiwan to avoid import tariffs and also not get completely screwed should China make a move on Taiwan. Taiwan running into manufacturing issues due to water shortages doesn't help either.

 

[ThatMouse]

I thought the bump in motherboard sales was due to Windows 11 requiring new hardware.