At the end of the line : The world’s four major motherboard manufacturers collectively saw their shipments decline by more than 10 million units in 2022, in line with broader industry trends. Unfortunately, a serious turnaround may not occur until late this year or early 2024.
Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock were among the hardest hit. According to supply chain sources, ASRock saw shipments drop 55% year-over-year, from around six million units in 2021 to just 2.7 million last year. MSI, meanwhile, shipped 9.5 million cards in 2021 but only managed to ship 5.5 million in 2022, a drop of more than 42%.
Asus fared a bit better, dropping from 18 million cards shipped in 2021 to 13.6 million last year (a drop of around 25%), while Gigabyte saw a 14% drop from 11 million units shipped to about 9.5 million.
THE “the usual suspectswere to blame for the drop in mobo shipping, including ongoing economic troubles, the abandonment of cryptocurrency mining, and the return of workers to offices.
The Components report is in line with others we’ve heard about in recent weeks and months regarding the overall health of the PC market. Just last week, Mercury Research said the fourth quarter of 2022 played host to the biggest decline in PC processor shipments in three decades and mirrored a similar result at the start of the year.
Mercury finally concluded that 2022 represented the biggest crisis ever in the PC processor industry, with only 374 million processors shipped for the full year. This is 21% less than in 2021 and notably does not include Arm processors.
Speaking of which, Counterpoint Research believes Arm processors are poised to capture a major share of the laptop market. By 2027, one in four laptops sold is expected to be powered by an Arm chip instead of a traditional x86 processor.
Going forward, the hardware market is expected to remain stable before the recovery begins towards the end of 2023 or in 2024.