Shipments of gaming notebooks, graphic cards and motherboards are expected to remain in high gear at least in the first half of the year, mainly propelled by the growing cryptomining fever, according to industry sources.
Demand for mining graphics cards has outstripped that for gaming ones along with the galloping of Bitcoin and Ethereum values, with strong sales momentum likely to persist throughout 2021, in turn pushing up shipments of motherboards paired with Nvidia's RTX 30 series GPUs for both mining and gaming applications, as well as driving up prices of both offerings, the sources said.
As a result, Taiwan's three major vendors of graphic cards, motherboards, and gaming notebooks are all expected to see first-quarter 2021 revenues and profits hit record highs for the same quarter, the sources continued.
Asustek Computer has reported its consolidated revenues for January 2021 rose 58.3% on year to NT$36.725 billion (US$1.311 billion); Micro-Star International (MSI)'s revenues for the month surged 36.7% sequentially and 69.1% on year to NT$17.023 billion; and Gigabyte Technology's corresponding sales soared 55.2% sequentially and 66.1% on year to NT$10.386 billion.
Among them, Gigabyte's January shipments of motherboards and graphics reached high levels of 1.24-1.25 million units and 350,000-360,000 units, respectively. The company expects its first-quarter 2021 shipments to grow sequentially, with its annual sales of both product lines to log double-digit on-year increases for the year.
With a growing variety of anti-virus vaccines ready for use, the entire PC industry is expected to enter a correction period later in the year, but it will take at least six months for people to return to normal work and living environments, industry sources said, stressing that demand for commercial notebooks, gaming notebooks, graphic cards and motherboards are expected to sustain significant momentum in the months ahead.
