Combined shipments of Taiwan's four major motherboard brands – Asustek Computer, Gigabyte Technology, Micro-Star International (MSI), and ASRock – are expected to have plunged over 10 million units from a year ago in 2022 as demand for motherboards has been feeble since early 2022, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.
With the ending of the stay-at-home economy and cryptocurrency mining trend, and the emergence of the economic downturn, the global PC DIY market has seen obvious declines in sales since the second half of 2022.
With sharply declining graphics card prices and decelerating motherboard and CPU sales, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia all experienced slimmed revenues in the latter half of 2022, especially Intel, which even suffered losses in the fourth quarter.
Although Intel has upgraded its offerings to the latest 13th generation Raptor Lake CPUs and 700 series chipsets and AMD Ryzen 9 7000 series, sales have not seen much of an improvement lately.
Asustek shipped 15.5 million brand motherboards in 2018 and 16.4 million units in 2019. The volumes went up to 17 million units in 2020 and hit over 18 million in 2021, but dived to 13.6 million units in 2022 partly because of the COVID-19 lockdowns in China, the major market for the PC DIY business.
Gigabyte shipped 11 million, 10.5 million, 13 million, and 11 million units from 2018-2021, respectively, but the volumes plummeted to only 9.4-9.6 million units in 2022. However, Gigabyte's server business is still enjoying steady orders at the moment.
MSI, which is relying primarily on its gaming notebook and graphics card businesses for profits, has seen its brand motherboard shipments rise from 2020's 6.7 million units to 2021's 9.5 million, but they also dropped to 5.5 million units in 2022.
ASRock output four million motherboards in 2018 and 4.3 million in 2019. They rose to nearly six million units in 2020 and 2021, but more than halved to only 2.7 million units in 2022.
For 2023, Asustek is conservative about its shipments and expects a small decline from a year ago, while Gigabyte is pushing to have its shipments stay flat from a year ago. ASRock is eyeing to slightly increase its shipments for the year, while MSI is looking to boost its motherboard shipments by over 15% on year.
Article translated by Joseph Tsai
