Taiwan's small-to-medium-size panel shipment went down over 20% sequentially and 4.3% on year to come to 184.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2021 as demand for feature phone panels plunged drastically during the period.
The fourth quarter of 2021 was the traditional peak season for the TV market and brand vendors' promotion campaigns launched for the year-end holidays in Europe and North America as well as Single's Day in China, boosted Taiwan's TV shipments by 9.7% sequentially to over eight million units in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Fourth-quarter 2021 smartphone shipments to the China market amounted to 80.5 million units. The volume represented a 9.5% increase from the prior quarter, driven by inventory preparation demand for the high season.
China-based smartphone brands shipped a total of 195 million phones in fourth-quarter 2021 as they aggressively ramped up shipments in the traditional high season in an attempt to make their whole-year target.
Fourth-quarter 2021 smartphone AP shipments to China-based vendors amounted to 171.2 million units, plunging 30.8% from the prior quarter mainly as China-based vendors faced the situation where some components were in worse shortage than the others, on top of weak 5G phone demand and a mismatch between AP supply and demand.
Global tablet shipments amounted to 37.13 million units in fourth-quarter 2021, up 5.4% from the prior quarter but down 20.2% from the prior year, as the tablet market continued to struggle with the IC shortage and the shipments came short of expectation in the traditional high season.
Fourth-quarter 2021 global server shipments grew 2.9% sequentially. IC and component shortages continue to haunt the server industry in the first quarter of 2022.
Taiwan's notebook shipments enjoyed better-than-expected growths in the fourth quarter of 2021, picking up over 10% sequentially, stronger than the 9% of the global average.
Taiwan-based manufacturers' revenues generated from server-related businesses including motherboards, complete systems as well as network communication and storage hardware and software are estimated to have grown 7.1% year-over-year to reach NT$1.65 trillion in 2021.
According to Digitimes Research's statistics and analyses, the 2021 global server market has a supply-demand gap as large cloud service operators step up orders to meet the pandemic-driven demand for cloud services, WFH and online services but the IC and component shortage disrupts shipment schedules.
Taiwan's PC monitor shipments increased sequentially as expected in the third quarter, but only went up 4.6%, smaller than the 6% forecasted in August as supply of some components was still tight.
