Apple Inc’s PC shipments plunged 40.5 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of the year, marking a tough start to the year for PC makers still grappling with a glut of unsold inventory.
Shipments by all PC makers combined slumped 29 percent year-on-year to 56.9 million units — and fell below the levels of early 2019 — as the demand surge driven by the COVID-19 pandemic-era remote work evaporated, International Data Corp (IDC) said in a report on Sunday.
Among the market leaders, Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) and Dell Technologies Inc registered drops of more than 30 percent, while HP Inc was down 24.2 percent. No major brand was spared from the slowdown, with Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) rounding out the top five with a 30.3 percent fall.
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The slowdown in consumer spending over the past year has led to double-digit declines in smartphone shipments and an accumulating glut among the world’s foremost memorychip suppliers.
Samsung Electronics Co, which provides memory chips for portable devices, as well as desktops and laptops, last week said it was cutting memory production after reporting its slimmest profit since the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.
“Though channel inventory has depleted in the last few months, it’s still well above the healthy four to six week range,” IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani said in the report. “Even with heavy discounting, channels and PC makers can expect elevated inventory to persist into the middle of the year and potentially into the third quarter.”
A silver lining is that the cooling demand is giving manufacturers the time and room “to make changes as many factories begin to explore production options outside China,” IDC said in the report.
The IDC researchers foresee a potential rebound for PC makers this year, driven by a combination of aging hardware that will need to be replaced and an improving global economy.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
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