From a strategic standpoint, Intel is intentionally not in the business of making money from selling systems. And for good reason, as doing so — at least on any kind of consistent basis —would alienate its OEM customers, whose existence does depend on making money from selling systems. However, to help seed demand, especially for novel products, Intel will create … Read more
PC market shows signs of growth or does it
The world as we know it is over. Dead, done, gone. We no longer have anything to count on, or a method with which to count. This is what the world used to look like. The direction has been a little depressing but the patterns have been set, we know what’s in store, year after year. Except for this … Read more
Intel reported its calendar Q3 2018, revenues were up 19% year-over-year driven, says the company, by strength across the business and customer demand for performance-leading Intel platforms. ”Stronger than expected customer demand across our PC and data-centric businesses continued in the third quarter. This drove record revenue and another raise to our full-year outlook,” said Bob Swan, Intel CFO and … Read more
Making forecasts is always complicated and never a sure thing; and, to get a forecast close to reality, it’s necessary to constantly tweak factors and adjust assumptions. US President Trump has precipitated quite a bit of tweaking and adjusting. As a result, we expect to see the Trump trade-war with China drive up costs and therefore the price-elasticity curve of … Read more
Just as the PC industry was showing signs of improving
Q1’18 GPU and PC shipments broke a lot of records. Q1 is traditionally a down quarter for PCs (see Figure 1). Q1’18 was down 14.1%, not a record, it went down 16.2% in Q1’16, but a big drop nonetheless. Figure 1: PC shipments and quarter-to-quarter change As the chart indicates, the PC market has been exhibiting a steady seasonal … Read more
Despite pockets of encouragement According to IDC’s crystal ball, traditional PCs are forecast to contract at a CAGR of -0.9% till 2022 with volumes dropping from 259.4 million in 2017 to 248.3 million in 2022. IDC sees a ray of sunshine in this bleak forecast when detachable tablets such as the Microsoft Surface Pro are included, and the growth rate … Read more
PC shipment models are out of synch What will the run up in AIB prices do to PC pricing? Probably not very much immediately, as the OEMs negotiate their deals six months ahead of shipping a PC and buy direct instead of through the opportunistic distribution channels, which have enthusiastically raised prices. However, smaller white box (WB), custom system integrators … Read more
